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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

There’s a moment in Laura Kaye’s underrated novel English Animals when the protagonist Mirka, sitting in the village bar with her married lover, notices that they can caress fairly openly by virtue of their both being women ‘Nobody was looking,’ she thinks to herself ‘I realised they probably thought we were only two friends who liked to touch each other a lot when they talked’ While the obliviousness of those around them is conducive to their affair, this moment encapsulates a problem queer women frequently encounter when searching for their counterparts in print and on screen So little attention is paid to women’s relationships with each other that amity and eroticism are too often confused, to uncomfortable effect: such blurring shows the lack of significance regularly attributed both to lesbianism and to deep female friendship When I was younger and first looking for media that represented my own experiences, this inchoate model of relationships used to make me cautious about ever getting too close to my female friends, in case they or I became similarly confused I was already lonely without a queer community, and this caution made me even lonelier   But in recent years I’ve begun to notice an increase in art by women about female friendship, which I hoped would help to make clearer the difference between these two kinds of relationship Perhaps, I thought, if we had more iconic examples of non-romantic, non-erotic friendships, representations of things I might do on a date with another woman — like holding her hand, or kissing her — wouldn’t be so readily coded as just being really great pals But on reading and watching works feted for their depictions of female friendship, I found that even writers I admired seemed determined to shoehorn in eroticism as a way of showing how close two women are I was disappointed by the passage in Zadie Smith’s NW where Natalie gets given a vibrator by Leah, whose past as a not entirely straight woman feels tacked on amid much more thoroughly explored class- and race-based discomfort The section of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant