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The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

East   Donbas My relatives were miners I did not quite grasp exactly what that meant, or what daily hazard the work implied All I remember is that everyone, like our family, had large miners’ lanterns at home They must have been given as gifts    The village where my grandparents lived smelled in summers of apples and coal, and in winters of coal alone, nothing else Most houses were a greyish-white, and most fences green Every shape and colour in this universe came dusted with a shade of grey    When the Russians invaded these territories in 2014 and propped up the so-called ‘People’s Republics’, we stopped talking to one of our relatives, my mother’s brother, who welcomed the new regime in Luhansk, siding with the people we called separs and vatniks The vast majority of our relatives, however (not that there were many), remained committed to their Ukrainian identity, despite the upheaval of their towns and villages being taken over by who knows whom    Take, for example, another uncle of mine, Uncle Vitya A retired but still robust man, he had come back to Donbas from Russian Novosibirsk several years before the war, in 2012 He finished building his own house and was full of joyful plans The war and the emergence of the separatist republics did not change his plans He remained in his village in the occupied territory At first, he used to fly the Ukrainian flag, argue with his neighbours, and try to change their minds Eventually, someone warned him that his flag was a black mark and was about to land him on ‘the list’ He took the flag down He put it inside, where its blue and yellow coloured the space all the more intensely    We would speak on Skype, and start every conversation with the latest astrological forecast Venus ascending Mars entering Capricorn in the middle of the summer, which means all unfinished business will be completed Poroshenko Zelensky Things are glum… but it will pass We’ll be Ukraine again    When I thought of the residents who had stayed in the occupied territories, Uncle Vitya