Greek Lessons

A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the celebrated author of International Booker Prize winner The Vegetarian.

"Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night..."

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek teacher at the blackboard. She tries t...

A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the celebrated author of International Booker Prize winner The Vegetarian.

"Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night..."

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but can't. Accustomed to her silence, the teacher is sympathetic—day by day he is losing his eyesight. But beyond their losses, a deeper pain binds them. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages.

Greek Lessons tells the stories of two ordinary people, their lives heightened by private anguish—where the light of a man losing his vision meets the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two slowly find one another through a sense of connection—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath.

Greek Lessons is a book to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive, and a remarkable love letter to human contact and tenderness.

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. She is the author of The Vegetarian, winner of the International Booker Prize, Human Acts, and The White Book. A recipient of the Yi Sang Literary Award, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Manhae Prize for Literature, she works as a professor in the department of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Deborah Smith wa...

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. She is the author of The Vegetarian, winner of the International Booker Prize, Human Acts, and The White Book. A recipient of the Yi Sang Literary Award, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Manhae Prize for Literature, she works as a professor in the department of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Deborah Smith was a co-winner of the International Booker Prize for her translation of The Vegetarian.

Emiily Yae Won is a translator based in Seoul. She has translated into Korean the work of Ali Smith and Deborah Levy.