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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

A pale three-quarter moon lit up the state highway at two in the morning The road connected the province of Taranto to Bari, and at that time of night it was usually deserted As it ran north, the road oscillated, aligning with and diverging from an imaginary axis, leaving behind it olive groves and vineyards and short rows of industrial sheds that resembled aeroplane hangars At kilometre marker 38, a service station appeared It was the last one for a while, and aside from the self-service pumps, vending machines serving coffee and cold food had recently been installed To promote the new attractions, the owner had installed a sky dancer on the roof of the auto repair shop One of those puppets that stand 15 feet tall, pumped up by powerful motorised fans   The inflatable barker fluttered in the empty air and would continue to do so until the morning light More than anything else, it made one think of a restless ghost   After passing that strange apparition the countryside ran on, flat and unvarying for miles It was almost like moving through the desert Then, in the distance, a sizzling tiara marked the city Beyond the guardrail, in contrast, lay untilled fields, fruit trees, and a few country houses nicely concealed by hedges Through those expanses moved nocturnal animals   Tawny owls traced long slanting lines through the air Gliding, they waited to flap their wings until they were just inches from the ground so that insects, terrified by the sudden tempest of shrubs and dead leaves, would rush out into the open, sealing their own fates A cricket, perched on a jasmine leaf, extended its antennae unevenly And, all around, impalpably, like a vast tide suspended in the air, a fleet of moths moved in the polarised light of the celestial vault   Unchanged over millions of years, the tiny, fuzzy-winged creatures were one with the formula that ensured their stability in flight Tied to the moon’s invisible thread, they were scouring the territory in their thousands, swaying from side to side to dodge the attacks of birds of prey Then, as had