The Book Beat reading group selection for May is Human Acts by Nobel laureate Han Kang. We will meet virtually online via Zoom or in store on Wednesday, May 28 at 7:00 p.m.
The Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending.
The Book Beat reading group features international works in translation. The discussion group is free and open to the public. Please call (248) 968-1190 or email bookbeatorders@gmail.com for more information or send us your name and emal to: bookbeatoders@gmail.com if you wish to attend.
Books are in stock now and discounted 15%.
“Human Acts is unique in the intensity and scale of this brutality…The novel details a bloody history that was deliberately forgotten and is only now being recovered.”
—The Nation
Amid a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.
The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho’s own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.
An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.
“Stunning…Han Kang has an ambition as large as Milton’s struggle with God: She wants to reconcile the ways of humanity to itself.”—NPR
“Revelatory…nothing short of breathtaking…What Han has re-created is not just an extraordinary record of human suffering during one particularly contentious period in Korean history, but also a written testament to our willingness to risk discomfort, capture, even death in order to fight for a cause or help others in times of need.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Human Acts” is, in equal parts, beautiful and urgent. Though it might not have been Han’s intention, her novel reads not only as a lyrical post-mortem on violence but also a call to counter that violence. So, how do we keep humanity “as one thing and not another”?
—The New York Times
Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. She is the author of The Vegetarian, winner of the International Booker Prize, as well as Human Acts, The White Book, Greek Lessons, and We Do Not Part. In 2024, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Known for her experimental fiction and her works that address humanity’s capacity for violence, Han was cited by the Nobel committee “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”