We Do Not Part by Han Kung

One of NYT 2025 notable books, our next read is not for the faint of heart. Quotes below are from NYTBR.
In "We Do Not Part," Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature "takes on the lasting devastation of the violent suppression of the Jeju uprising of 1948 and 1949, probably unfamiliar to many American readers despite the complicity of the United States military in the massacres that took place in the name of anticommunism....
"Han’s novel is narrated by Kyungha, a historian and writer living in Seoul who suffers from chronic pain.. She and her friend Inseon, a filmmaker turned carpenter from Jeju, have long planned to collaborate on an ambitious project, part installation and part documentary feature, incorporating blackened logs in a landscape as a memorial to the victims of violence. The cut-down trees stand in for cut-down people — in Kyungha’s dream, they are “torsos” — just as the women’s failure to complete the project stands in for the impossibility of ever fully reckoning with the brutality of power...
"Inseon tasks her friend with an urgent journey to Jeju, about 300 miles away, to save a pet bird she fears will starve to death while she lies in her hospital bed. But a dangerous snowstorm hampers the quixotic bird-rescue expedition, and Kyungha is left isolated in the dreamlike surroundings of Inseon’s compound, where she eventually uncovers evidence of her friend’s obsessive investigation into the family’s tragic losses in the time of the massacres."