Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend`s corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, & a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims & the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness & the echoing agony of the original trauma. Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern & profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller & award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.