The Vegetarian
A Novel
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A beautiful, unsettling novel in three acts, about rebellion and taboo, violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul, from the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize.
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more 'plant-like' existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares.
In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision is a shocking act of subversion. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism. His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide and hospitalisation. She unknowingly captivates her sister's husband, a video artist. She becomes the focus of his increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, while spiraling further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming - impossibly, ecstatically - a tree.
Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.
The Vegetarian is the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction. In 2024, Han Kang became the first South Korean writer and the first female Asian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
About this Author
HAN KANG was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.
Reviews
"A strange, painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire indulged and the fatality of desire ignored... Exquisite." - Eimear McBride, Baileys Women's Prize-winning author, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
It's a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader's diet. It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions. Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience. [It] will be hard to beat.
Daniel Hahn
Entrancing and tense... the writing is spare and haunting... its crushing climax, a phantasmagoric yet emotionally true moment that's surely one of the year's most powerful... [This is] an ingenious, upsetting, and unforgettable novel.
Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)
The Vegetarian is a story about metamorphosis, rage and the desire for another sort of life. It is written in cool, still, poetic but matter-of-fact short sentences, translated luminously by Deborah Smith, who is obviously a genius.
Deborah Levy
A haunting, hypnotic read, Han Kang's novel is a bold example of what world literature has to offer us here in Britain.
Erica Wagner, Harper's Bazaar
[An] unsettling novel... This spare and elegant translation renders the original Korean in pointed and vivid English, preserving Han's exploration of whether true innocence is possible in a vicious and bloody world.
The New York Times-The Ten Best Books of 2016
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