Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.
...there is no end to the horrors that rattle in and out of this ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel ... Han’s glorious treatments of agency, personal choice, submission and subversion find form in the parable.
This is Han Kang’s first novel to appear in English, and 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 ... The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience.
Han’s striking language has a purity, especially when it touches into the deep melancholia that is part of South Korea’s modern inheritance, in its explorations of the psyche in flux ... a remarkable novel with universal themes about isolation, obsession, duty and desire.
