The White Book

Han Kang Portobello Books €14

The South Korean writer’s autobiographical novella is composed of a series of brief meditations or prose poems on ‘white things’, arising from the narrator pondering the death of her mother’s first child. Kang, who won the Man Booker International for The Vegetarian, applies her luminous prose to salt, fog, breast milk, snow and more. A couple of chapters describe parts of a European city that was bombed in 1944, and there are photos of white things or a female figure in silhouette, à la William Sebald. It’s a strange fictional journal of loss, depicting a mind distracted by life amid thoughts of death.