Long before The Vegetarian showed up as one of my Christmas gifts, I had planned to read something of Han Kang’s work. The award in 2024 of the Nobel Prize focused that intention, but it started several years ago when I bought (but never read) The White Book.

There can be few pleasures more satisfying for the dedicated reader than the discovery of a brilliant, new voice. The Vegetarian is that rare thing, a book quite unlike anything else. Eerie and disturbing, fierce and deeply strange, it’s a work that refused stubbornly to leave my mind after I had turned the final page.

Yeong-hye stops eating meat. The reaction of her family is, to say the least, extreme, and sets in motion a sequence of events as appalling as they are unforeseen. But The Vegetarian is far more than an account of one woman’s struggle to have control of her destiny. It becomes an extraordinarily powerful and dark fable about power and obsession. In less skillful hands, this might have turned into something more mundane, but Han Kang’s prose, simultaneously cool and passionate, elevates The Vegetarian into a nightmare of Kafka-like intensity.