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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

Scholastique Mukasonga is Rwanda’s most celebrated author Her eight works of memoir and fiction, all written in French, reckon with the country’s tumultuous twentieth century in graceful prose distinguished by its warmth, directness and moral charisma Combining the authority of traditional storytelling with the techniques of the social novel, her books explore themes of mourning and remembrance, female community, education and the insidious legacy of Rwanda’s Christianisation At their centre lies the struggle of Rwandan Tutsis, who suffered decades of violence and displacement before the genocide of 1994   Born in 1956, Mukasonga spent most of her childhood in a resettlement village on Rwanda’s outskirts, expelled with her family and thousands of other Tutsis by the independence era’s Hutu nationalist government She overcame poverty and strict ethnic quotas to attend college for social work, but fled the country in 1973, when Hutu classmates assaulted her and other Tutsis amid widespread killings Mukasonga moved to Burundi and then Djibouti before settling in Normandy, where she was living when the genocide killed thirty-seven members of her family She lost both of her parents and all but one of her siblings; their village was effectively wiped off the map   Grief and the determination to rescue her loved ones from oblivion would inspire Mukasonga’s first two memoirs, Cockroaches (2006) and The Barefoot Woman (2008) After their success, she began writing fiction, winning the Prix Renaudot for Our Lady of the Nile (2012) The novel brilliantly allegorises Rwanda’s 1973 unrest – a harbinger of the genocide – through the intrigues of a Catholic girls’ boarding school for daughters of the elite An equally magnetic film adaptation by Atiq Rahimi debuted earlier this year   Inspired by her mother’s storytelling, Mukasonga’s later fiction has turned decisively towards Rwanda’s traditional culture, which she sees as a bulwark against racial division The stories in Ce que murmurent les collines (What the Hills Murmur, 2014) reach back to the advent of colonialism and the collapse of Rwanda’s ancient monarchy, while her most recent novel, Kibogo est monté au ciel (Kibogo Went Up to Heaven, 2020), features a rogue native priest defrocked for syncretising