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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

Namwali Serpell is a rarity: an academic and novelist whose criticism is as vital as her fiction Since we first spoke, in September 2020, she has both taken up a position as Professor of English at Harvard and, with her debut novel The Old Drift (2019), won the prestigious Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction, the first black woman to have done so The award’s last winner, Tade Thompson, has called Serpell’s book ‘the great African novel of the twenty-first century’ In a characteristically radical and generous gesture, having won the award on the day it was announced that no murder charges would be filed against the police officers responsible for killing Breonna Taylor, Serpell donated her prize money to the bail funds of those who have protested that injustice   The Old Drift is a remarkable book, an epic of Zambia, where Serpell was born, which, over its nearly 600 pages, refracts the country’s history – from Cecil Rhodes to Rhodes Must Fall – through the mistakes and misfortunes of the members of three families, some of them real historical figures, others otherworldly, like figures from fairytale or folklore, over six generations The novel crosses genre just as it spans time, taking in magic realism, social realism, satire, science fiction, historical fiction, spy thriller… Reading it, you realise what a sham, what a constraint ‘genre’ is It’s a polyphonous and brimming piece of work; intricately, shiftingly patterned, acute in its sustained variousness It seems, throughout, to shimmer with a meaning you can never quite discern, provoking what Serpell, in her first, academic book, Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014), describes as a ‘useful dizziness’ – and it does so, despite the immense and real suffering it contains, in a joyful, generous way   Seven Modes of Uncertainty is a rigorous and ingenious academic exploration of a number of modern novels – among them Lolita, Beloved and American Psycho – that use strategies of structural uncertainty (two characters with irreconcilable versions of events, for instance) to challenge their readers’ ethical engagement Reading such books, Serpell demonstrates, provides less an illusory