Awards
2016 Man Booker International Prize
Staff Pick
Horror and transformation so often hold hands narratively that change of any kind can seem a shudder inducing, costly affair. Lush, violent, and tense, Han Kang's three-part exploration of one woman's transformation and what it costs her is a grim and bloody fairy tale for those familiar with the high stakes and high price of change. Recommended By SitaraG, Powells.com
Reminiscent of both Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and Yanagihara's A Little Life, this book will leave you feeling completely scoured. Recommended By Gin E., Powells.com
At its surface, The Vegetarian is about a Korean housewife who has a prophetic dream and decides to become a vegetarian, a simple subversion that brings chaos to her relationships with her family and husband. As you go deeper, you find yourself in a fable about a woman who thinks she's turning into a tree, an absurdity that brings about a slow creeping horror that calls into question the stability of even the most solid social structures, and, more terrifyingly, what it means to live a life where you truly do no harm. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com
Somewhere between the crossroads of obsession, mental illness, lust, and betrayal, The Vegetarian exists.
When Yeong-hye has a vivid dream that leads her to give up eating meat, she attracts the unwelcome attention of not only her husband but others as well. Her life begins to come undone, and that unraveling leaves much destruction in its wake.
Told in alternating points of view, while trying to account for human nature gone sideways, The Vegetarian is a stunning read. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is 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.
A Best Book of the Year: BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly
Review
"Compelling . . . [A] seamless union of the visceral and the surreal.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“A complex, terrifying look at how seemingly simple decisions can affect multiple lives . . . In a world where women’s bodies are constantly under scrutiny, the protagonist’s desire to disappear inside of herself feels scarily familiar.”—Vanity Fair
“Elegant . . . a stripped-down, thoughtful narrative . . . about human psychology and physiology.”—HuffPost
About the Author
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.