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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

In Neil Marshall’s 2005 horror film The Descent, a group of women go spelunking and become trapped deep underground in a winding, disorienting cave system The women are athletic and trained, their storylines and inter-personal relationships tense and toxic, complicated by hidden affairs and neglected friendships The film is terrifying: the downfall of the group — and the framework for the whole, horrifying sequence of events that unfold — rests solely on one woman’s inflated ego and her brittle ambition to be the first to map and claim this as yet unchartered subterranean cave system They begin to act brutally towards each other Yet it makes a nice, albeit rare, change to see women acting horrendously, instead of the usual male-on-female violence that proliferates horror films and real life The film is a portal to a nihilistic hellscape dominated by amorphous yet vaguely humanoid flesh-eating creatures who begin to hunt the trapped women indiscriminately by following their voices Foregrounding both female strength and flaws, the subterranean not only becomes a home to violence, but seems to give permission for violence to be freely practiced The movement of the film speaks to the familiar lines from Dante, seen on arrival at the gates of hell:   Through me you go to the grief-wracked city Through me to everlasting pain you go Through me you go and pass among lost souls Justice inspired my exalted Creator I am a creature of the Holiest Power, of Wisdom in the Highest and of Primal Love Nothing till I was made was made, only eternal beings And I endure eternally Surrender as you enter every hope you have   Jenny George’s debut book of poems The Dream of Reason submerges the reader in subterranea from its first few lines, finding a linguistic parallel for the technique used in The Descent to induce a sense of horror from the start Just as the women in