The Vegetarian

Description

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2016

‘A strange, painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire indulged and the fatality of desire ignored… Exquisite.’ Eimear McBride

Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people – dutiful wife and mild-mannered office worker. One day, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye decides to become a vegetarian. But in South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, it is a shocking act of subversion.

Yeong-hye’s passive rebellion rapidly manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, from sexual sadism to attempted suicide, and in increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, as all the while she spirals further into her fantasies…

Disturbing and beautiful by turns, The Vegetarian is a revelatory novel about modern day South Korea; a tale of shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others.

Han Kang

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet and published her first short story in 1994. 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 ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’.