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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

It is a story told in every Creole family I know in Mauritius It is often narrated during a long drive: a window rolls down and a hand gestures to stanzas upon stanzas of sugarcane, or bungalows on the coast, or valleys now privately owned ‘This used to be ours,’ says a parent ‘They took it We lost it’   There are several common stories of the taking The Creole child of a white man is forbidden from inheriting his property An illiterate widow signs acres of land to corrupt notaries, who promise that her progeny will be taken care of Families are chased out of their homes   These are old stories, learned by rote and handed down like a relic, a warning: Look at all we had Look: you could lose everything too   With time and pain these stories often become nebulous – sometimes on purpose   My mother’s way of coping with her family history is near-absolute silence; she fears, perhaps, that poverty and stigma will return to plague her once it is spoken out loud Details of her life are sparse and often excruciating A lower middle-class upbringing The shame of having bronze skin with a white surname On my mother’s side of the family, my great-grandfather was a wealthy white man, who had many mistresses; one was a woman of African descent, his maid They had several children together and eventually married My great-grandmother loved her husband fastidiously They brought up their children in the big house; my grandfather and his sisters carried the white name, though, according to my mother, it would have been a kindness if my great-grandfather had given them my great-grandmother’s maiden name instead My great-grandmother would hide in another part of the house when my great-grandfather’s white friends would drive up the Montagne Longue mountain to see him   My mother took me to Montagne Longue only once, when I was around five years old I remember that she was with her eldest brother, and that we were in the region to visit a friend My uncle probably decided we should look at ‘our’ land again, though there was no former