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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

‘People always say you can’t change the past,’ suggests Sarah Moss in her interview in this issue, ‘but of course you can change the past completely, because you can tell a different story about it’ Moss’s books, as Hannah Rosefield writes, ‘negotiate the past and imagine the future’: she discusses optimism, fridge-magnet clichés, the dangers of nationalist nostalgia (particularly in relation to contemporary nature writing), and how to ‘perform love by work’   Several of Moss’s novels are written in the voices of children, a perspective – raw, unfiltered, perhaps unreliable, often seeking self-definition or belonging – which recurs throughout this issue of The White Review In ‘Fried Egg’, a discomfiting story by Spanish writer Sabina Urraca (tr Thomas Bunstead), a woman who has retreated to a haunted house in an attempt to disconnect from society recalls an incongruous childhood in a sinister anti-natal commune Elvia Wilk’s essay ‘Kids in the Field’ dissects the knotty dissonance inherent in growing up as the child of anthropologists Her unstable memories of her childhood in Belize – and her uncomfortable return – are interspersed with a nuanced examination of the anthropological discipline’s historical baggage, the sociological and emotional implications of growing up in a culture not your own, and the possibilities and limits of ‘assimilation’   We publish new fiction – her first in two years – by Claire-Louise Bennett, a supermarket reverie transporting us from the aisles of a suburban retail park to the velveteen splendour of the Viennese opera Fernanda Melchor’s essay ‘Veracruz with a Zee for Zeta’ (tr Sophie Hughes) examines life in contemporary Mexico through a series of violent vignettes set in its beaches, nightclubs, supermarkets, streets and homes Readers of Melchor’s explosive novel Hurricane Season will recognise her propulsive torrents of prose, her polyvocal narrative style, and her rage against power ‘Extremity’ by Taiwanese writer Hsu Yu-Chen (tr Jeremy Tiang) is an acerbic and poignant story of queer desire and loneliness: although in May 2019 Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage, the elections of this January were characterised by virulently homophobic rhetoric directed at President Tsai Ing-Wen, who had signed the bill into law   Rosanna Mclaughlin interviews artist Samara Scott, whose work collects and collages used materials, from