The Vegetarian

A strange, painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire indulged and the fatality of desire ignored... Exquisite -- Eimear McBride, Baileys Women's Prize-winning author * A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing * The Vegetarian is a story about metamorphosis, rage and the desire for another sort of life. It is written in cool, still, poetic but matter-of-fact short sentences, translated luminously by Deborah Smith, who is obviously a genius -- Deborah Levy, author * Swimming Home * [The Vegetarian] is understated even in its most fevered, violent moments. It has a surreal and spellbinding quality. Enthralling -- Arifa Akbar * Independent * It's a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader's diet. It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions. Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience. [It] will be hard to beat -- Daniel Hahn * Guardian * Shocking... The writing throughout is precise and spare, with not a word wasted. There are no tricks. Han holds the reader in a vice grip... The Vegetarian quickly settles into a dark, menacing brilliance that is similar to the work of the gifted Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa in its devastating study of psychological pain... [It] is more than a cautionary tale about the brutal treatment of women: it is a meditation on suffering and grief. It is about escape and how a dreamer takes flight. Most of all, it is about the emptiness and rage of discovering there is nothing to be done when all hope and comfort fails... A work of savage beauty and unnerving physicality. Mind-blowing -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times * Entrancing and tense... the writing is spare and haunting... its crushing climax, a phantasmagoric yet emotionally true moment that's surely one of the year's most powerful... [This is] an ingenious, upsetting, and unforgettable novel -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) The Vegetarian is hypnotically strange, sad, beautiful and compelling. I liked it immensely -- Nathan Filer, author * The Shock of the Fall * A stunning and beautifully haunting novel. It seems in places as if the very words on the page are photosynthesising. I loved this graceful, vivid book -- Jess Richards, author * Snake Ropes * Poetic and beguiling, and translated with tremendous elegance, The Vegetarian exhilarates and disturbs -- Chloe Aridjis, author * The Book of Clouds * This short novel is one of the most startling I have read. Kang is well served by Deborah Smith's subtle translation in this disturbing book -- Julia Pascal * Independent * Kang belongs to a generation of writers that aim to discover secret drives, ambitions, and miseries behind one's personal destiny... [The Vegetarian] deals with violence, sanity, cultural limits, and the value of the human body as the last refuge and private space * Tiempo Argentino * Disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is translated by Deborah Smith into poetic yet matter-of-fact prose -- Richard Eves * Big Issue in the North * A fine novel -- David Hebblethwaite * Shiny New Books * This off-kilter novel from Korea is simultaneously beautiful and sinister * Absolutely Dulwich * The Vegetarian is so strange and vivid it left me breathless upon finishing it. I don't think I've ever read a novel as mouth-wateringly poetic, or as drenched in hypnotic oddities, taboos and scandal. It seems to have been plucked out of the ether, ready-made to take us all by surprise. Exciting and compelling -- Lee Rourke * New Humanist * Elegantly translated into bone-spare English by Deborah Smith... The Vegetarian whispers so clearly, it can be heard across the room, insistently and with devastating, quiet violence -- Joanna Walsh * New Statesman * Fascinating and powerful. A really engrossing read * Guardian * Unsettling... [a] strange and ethereal fable, rendered stranger still by the cool precision of the prose -- Pete

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, was published by Portobello Books in 2015 and won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. She is also the author of Human Acts (Portobello, 2016) and The White Book (Portobello, forthcoming 2017). She is based in Seoul.