'Light and Thread': Read of the Week (March 22 to March 27)

What is love? It is the gold thread connecting our hearts. In this light-filled and multi-faceted book, her first since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang draws together the threads of her work and life, tracing the connections between her interior and exterior worlds through a sequence of essays, poems, photographs and diaries.

A book of reflections, of words and light, it has at its heart the tiny, north-facing courtyard garden at her home, cultivated solely through the reflected sunlight of the mirrors which she must move throughout the day, as the earth turns on its axis.

In a poem written when she was eight, Han Kang imagined a ‘gold thread’ of connection, an idea which she explores here with luminous attention, beginning with her Nobel Lecture. She writes of the wonder of following the thread we call language into the depths of other hearts, and her profound sense of an electric current which joins writer and reader. Both intimate and illuminating, Light and Thread is a book for all readers of Han Kang’s unique body of work.

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. She won the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian and was shortlisted for The White Book. In 2024, Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.