When Korean novelist Han Kang won the Nobel prize in literature in 2024, the committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. In other words, Han’s work looks both out at the world – towards the 1980 Gwangju massacre fictionalised in her novel Human Acts –  and inward to the human experience, as with The Vegetarian’s portrait of one woman’s claustrophobic struggle.

Much of the appeal of Han’s work is in its mystery, the gaps she leaves for the reader to close. So it is tantalising to have this collection of prose, “a book of reflections” that might illuminate the darker corners of her work.

It is a hope partly fulfilled. Light and Thread – the title from a poem Han wrote at the age of eight – comes in three parts, which we might categorise as writing, poetry and gardening. The title essay, her Nobel laureate lecture, does open up the novels a little. The Vegetarian, about a woman whose progressive rejection of social norms results in her trying to become a plant, was, we learn, inspired by questions such as, “To what depths can we reject violence?” A book for Han is complete “when I reach the end of these questions – which is not the same as when I find answers to them”.

It’s no surprise that Han, haunted by a youthful encounter with a photo book commemorating the victims of the Gwangju massacre, was forced to abandon a “radiant, life-affirming novel” she had been working on and write Human Acts instead. As for Greek Lessons – the story of a mute woman and a man losing his sight, and the most opaque of her novels – the question Han wrestles with tempers dread with hope. “Could it be that by regarding the softest aspects of humanity, by caressing the irrefutable warmth that resides there, we can go on living after all in this brief, violent world?” Sometimes she finds herself weeping as she writes.

It is clear that for Han, writing is a psychic necessity, an impression confirmed when she talks about her most recent novel – arguably her best yet – We Do Not Part. Its feverish state and isolated snowy landscape came from a dream Han experienced: a vision she sought to recreate for the reader. This led to a series of method‑style writing episodes: she would “lie under my desk, curled on my side, to try to experience the interior of a hole in the ground”, or “clench and unclench fistfuls of snow until my hands grow stiff, trying to make sure I’ll remember how it feels”. A dedicated approach, to be sure, even if the sceptical reader might wonder why Han couldn’t simply use her imagination.

If the writing essays are the richest part of the book, the poems that follow are slight and evasive. Meditation on Pain clearly draws on Han’s own experience of chronic pain, but its analogy of a bird in a cage offers far less visceral understanding of her condition than her account in earlier interviews of having such painful joints that she could only type by attaching pens to her fists and hammering the keyboard.

The theme of the final section is Han’s garden: a space she created in a north-facing courtyard of her home, and into which she has directed light with strategically placed mirrors. It’s a task of precise administration. “To distribute the light evenly across every tree, the angle and placement of all eight mirrors must be shifted once every 15 minutes or so.”

The way Han submits her routine to the needs of the plants makes a connection with The Vegetarian, and with the central question she reiterates in the writing essays: “What does it mean to belong to the species named human?” There is beautiful imagery: “When the southerly noon sun slowly passes these mirrors, a patch of light appears on the wall, like a window.” But sometimes a garden is just a garden, and there is​​ some very thin fare here. A declaration such as, “This morning I had the water meter checked and the septic tank cleaned” will not quicken even the keenest reader’s heart, nor will, “I heard that tomorrow, it will rain.”

In her Nobel lecture, Han says that she has not yet completed her next novel. So Light and Thread is a stop gap, for Han as well as her readers. It has moments that remind us of why her work is so important, but the work itself is what we want.

This summer, when I was signing books after an event, I met a therapist who had bought my novel and who was planning to suggest it to her client, too. I Will Crash depicts a difficult sibling relationship and it was a reading experience she thought her client would find helpful. “We’re still behind in how we talk about siblings,” she said. “The taboo is strong. We’ve got parents down,” she continued, “but for siblings, it’s still early.”

Her comment was gratifying – what she expressed was partly why I had wanted to write a sibling relationship in the first place. With a relationship between a parent and a child, there are well-known dynamics at play: a power imbalance, a duty of care, expectations. Larkin’s “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” has been repeated and passed on – a great line turned cliche, diminished by repeated acknowledgment like a stone eroded on a beach. A parent-child relationship remains complicated but our scaffolding for how to talk about it in adulthood is stronger. With siblings, the terrain becomes unreliable. What are they: twisted reflections of ourselves? Allies? Enemies? What are we allowed to expect of them?

By some curious shake of the snow globe, a host of recent novels have, like mine, taken the subject on. In May came The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes and Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors, both about a group of sisters distanced from each other; there was also further focus on Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About – a novel about a woman mourning the death of her twin brother – thanks to the International Booker prize. Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, published in June, was told from the perspectives of three bristling sisters. And now we have Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, about a fraught relationship between two brothers.

Intermezzo alternates between Ivan and Peter, brothers whose relationship is laced with misinterpretations. During the novel, they become temporarily estranged; Ivan forcing the hand of his frustration. The tension is exacerbated by a crisis – their father has recently died. Crises strike all these novels. The sibling relationship is by default ongoing so it’s not surprising that writers use events to initiate change and tension-point. Some, like Armfield, Hughes, Mellors and Rooney, switch between sibling perspectives to study conflicting interpretations. In Posthuma’s novel and my own, the pain is in the impossibility of seeing the other side.

Though these novels are remarkably different from one another, essential truths recur: how siblings can see each other in straitjacketed roles, set prematurely into an understanding of the other; how inextricable the relationship can be even if unpleasant. Friends can pass out of lives slowly, gently, until their significance is permitted to fade. Romantic relationships can be ended and eventually accepted as having not been right. But relationships we do not choose – that we are born with or pick up soon afterwards – we can feel tied to. In positive sibling relationships, that’s the joy: one, two, three, more people who will always be connected to you and care for you. But when relationships are irreconcilable, the elevation of blood ties becomes a trap.

In Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, Irene and Isla have a shared distance to their half-sister, Agnes; dismissing her while assuming a relationship. “It is not my fault,” Agnes says to them at one point in the novel, “‘if you have certain expectations of our relationship that I have never invited you to have.” In another scene, Irene sits back in her chair and studies Isla. “Only you make me like this, she wants to say. You think I’m like this and that makes me worse”. And then, in an inevitable baton-switch, she makes her own supposition: “She has always felt Isla might quite easily turn out to be keeping a hunchback in a bell tower … or whatever else it is extremely uptight people often turn out to have been doing in private.” The joke houses her own assumption (Isla being uptight); failing to contemplate what makes Isla turn cold.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

In Intermezzo, Ivan blocks Peter’s number after an argument at a restaurant. Soon after, the woman Ivan is seeing, Margaret, asks him whether everything is OK between him and his brother. He keeps his gaze downwards and says they’ve never really been friends.

“Yeah, he says. It’s whatever. You know, he told me once before there’s no point trying to talk to me, because I can’t speak any normal language anyway. And that I have a weird accent. International Chess English, he called it. The way I speak.”

His response is loaded with the fate of a failed sibling relationship: cached memories tailored to make the decision to end a relationship convincing. Yet the shards sound wrong. They sound like a man summoning past hurts in order to mask something that is harder to explain.

Since the publication of I Will Crash, I have met readers who bought the novel or came to events specifically for the recognition. Two sisters – friends with each other but mutually estranged from their brother – both bought the book and seemed energised. Another, whose estranged brother had died recently, knew it would be a hard read but felt gratified by the prospect. There was a recurring acknowledgment that this relationship was hard to find in fiction.

This new shelf of books – varied in style and approach yet grouped by an attention to the murkiness of sibling relationships – is not just a coincidence but an opportunity. Beyond the pleasure of language and craft, novels feed us empathy, recognition, different models for life. Here is an opportunity to sit more comfortably with imperfect relationships, and to be reinforced when life grants us situations that we can imagine better yet cannot resolve.

We attended the ALA Conference this year and had a blast connecting with libraries and publishers. Here are some of our key takeaways.

1. Libraries are under attack and need support more than ever.  Depending on the state, new laws are being proposed and passed that go further than banning books to outright threatening librarians with criminal charges (see Idaho).  Public discourse is increasingly bringing libraries into the culture wars, and it’s at the forefront of many librarian’s minds as they consider whether to stay and fight to make a difference or move to a state that’s more supportive of libraries and librarians.

2. There are an overwhelming number of books out there.  There were more books on display at the marketplace than one single person could ever read in their lifetime (even though there were many children’s books on display as well!) One 20 foot display we visited (see below) had more books than BookBrowse recommends in an entire year.  We believe that our role in curating the best of the best remains more important than ever.

3. Libraries are committed to being welcoming for everyone.  This stance is surprisingly controversial (see above), but it’s amazing to see how much time, attention, and care librarians are putting into making libraries inclusive – for example, creating special accommodations for patrons that don’t have the motor skills to easily handle paper books.  

4. Libraries have a marketing challenge. Libraries offer so many great resources to patrons, even beyond books, but from the librarians we spoke to, many shared that they felt like they failed to get the word out effectively among the members of their community. The librarians we spoke to mentioned that attending different community events were an effective way to showcase all libraries offer to new parts of the community – even something as simple as setting a booth up at their town fair.

Libraries provide more value for their communities than ever before, so we should support them more than we ever have.  BookBrowse is honored to help libraries and their patrons discover books that not only entertain, but also engage and enlighten.

Oleksandr Mykhed and his wife Olena lost their home when the Russians invaded Ukraine. Before February 2022 he had never held a gun in his hands. But a week before the invasion, fearing the worst, he trained with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. And after helping to make a bomb shelter out of a university library in Chernivtsi, he enlisted in the armed forces of Ukraine.

His book, much of it written during his 100 days in the barracks, is less a record of armed service than a reflection on the impact of war – how it has changed him and others, too, not least children. It’s a ferociously angry book, borne of “rage, love for homeland, revenge”. Where his compatriot Andrey Kurkov’s reports from Ukraine are nuanced and sometimes comic, Mykhed’s are bitter and indignant. “This is a book about things one can never forget. Or forgive,” he says, recalling the free and happy life he enjoyed before the Russian army and “a gigantic net of saboteurs” destroyed it.

“We are not anti-Russia,” he claims, but you wouldn’t know it: “All Russians must realise: this war is also theirs.” Even Russian culture, “an integral part of a repressive imperial machine”, is tainted: till the war is over, he warns, no Russian artists, novelists or film-makers will have a voice in Ukraine. Even those who distance themselves from Putin’s “manic empire” are complicit (“I cannot help blaming all Russians”). Would-be peace-making or compromise-minded westerners are tainted, too. (“They do not seem to understand that for us Russia is a cannibal”). As for the Russian army – “a wild horde” of terrorists and rapists – he documents their war crimes in great detail. “The lesson of this war: always prepare for the worst, but still expect the Russians to do even worse.”

As its title suggests, his book is as much about the idiom of war as its conduct. Where Russians “use language as a camouflage net”, passing off bombs and mass killing as an innocuous-sounding SMO (“special military operation”), Ukrainians, as the victims, struggle to find words. A lament for the dead or a curse for the enemy is as much as they can manage. Or a “loop” of words to get them through the daily horror: “Eat, kill, grief, repeat.” Communication is reduced to military passwords. In war even literature loses the power to console: “I don’t believe in the possibility of escaping into a fictional world when the reality of your very life is ablaze.”. All a writer like Mykhed can do is testify, so the enemy’s misdeeds won’t be ignored. “The more of us they kill, the more of us will bear witness to their evil.”

Mykhed is conscious that his fervour may strike outsiders as extreme. But fervour is unavoidable; pride, panic, patriotism and mourning are integral to the story: “It is impossible to take a breather from this grief.”. Its jagged and circuitous structure reflects a man at the end of his tether: “I’ve never thought of self-harming before. Till now.” He has never been one to cry, either, but can’t hide his wounds. It’s as if his original self has been killed, he says, and a fourth or fifth self has taken its place. The book is an emotional convulsion as well as a chronicle. He lives out of a grab bag, forever on the move, as if in “a terrible dream”.

Though himself childless, he’s especially emotional about children and the damage done to them by war. With 6,000 Ukrainian children in “re-education” camps in Russia, and more than 2 million forced to leave their homes, a whole generation has been traumatised. He has collected more than a hundred stories (“my private war childhood museum”) and in a long chapter towards the end he offers fragments from them: a five-year-old who simulates the sound of an air raid; a boy telling his sister, “You stink like Putin”; another who uses a little box as a shelter to safeguard ants; a group playing “Mariupol” with water pistols.

Further traumas appear in his conversations with fellow Ukrainians, the last of them his mother, a literature professor who was forced to flee with her husband from Bucha after the invasion and whose way of coping with the shock of evacuation was to keep her coat on at all times, as if it was a shell or cocoon. His parents’ plight enrages Mykhed: “War is living through history that you would not wish on anyone.” But his epilogue does offer a measure of hope. “My faith in the power of literature is being restored by the Russian occupiers’ fear of our books and culture,” he says, and he imagines himself, “on the day of our victory”, on a wide road between fields, “an amazing landscape before me. Another week or two will pass, and the season will change, hiding the scars of war.” Even then, he’ll still need to let out a long scream: “I want to forget it all. I want to never forget.”

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion