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Greek Lessons
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  • Published: 27 April 2023
  • ISBN: 9780241997079
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160

Greek Lessons

Formats & editions
Paperback
7 May 2024
EBook
27 Apr 2023
Audiobook
27 Apr 2023
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A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the celebrated author of The Vegetarian

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. 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 story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish - the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting 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 discover a profound sense of unity - their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.

Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.

Translated by Deborah Smith and e. yaewon.
  • Published: 27 April 2023
  • ISBN: 9780241997079
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
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About the author

Han Kang

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet and published her first short story in 1994. She won the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian and was shortlisted for The White Book. In 2024, Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’.

Among other major awards and prizes she is the winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger 2023 for the French edition of We Do Not Part. She taught in the department of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts for eleven years before leaving in 2018 to focus on writing. She is the fifth writer to contribute to the ongoing Future Library project in Oslo, Norway.

HK

Also by Han Kang

We Do Not Part
Light and Thread
See all

Praise for Greek Lessons

Han Kang's vivid and at times violent storytelling will wake up even the most jaded of literary palates

Independent

Han Kang is a writer like no other. In a few lines, she seems to traverse the entirety of human experience

Katie Kitamura

Another stunning gem: quiet, sharply faceted, and devastating

Kirkus

Han Kang's hypnotic Greek Lessons probes the limits of language

The Straits Times

An elliptical, enigmatic book . . . Han's style creates mystery

The Economist

In Greek Lessons Kang reaches beyond the usual senses to translate the unspeakable . . . Han Kang turns the well-worn idea of the mind-body disconnect into something fresh and substantial

Los Angeles Times

This novel is a celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language . . . [Han] is an astute chronicler of unusual, insubordinate women

The New York Times

By turns love letter to and critique of language itself, Greek Lessons is a brief yet, in its concision and finesse, lapidary work . . . one of Han's most intimate works

Financial Times

Han Kang is what most writers spend their lives trying to be: a fearless, unsentimental teller of human truths . . . Han Kang is a genius

Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies