Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Snow can be a pain in the butt. You got to

shovel your sidewalk, throw it down salt, clear it from your car. But for the Nobel Prize winning

writer, Hong Kong, snow is something else. It's a connection between the living and the dead,

between the sky and the ground, between light and darkness.

That's how she puts it in today's interview, talking about her new novel, We Do Not Part.

It's a novel that covers a brutal and violent time in Korean history, a history that was papered over by the South Korean government.

She talks to M.P to NPR Scott Simon about how

the snow metaphor that fills her book fits into that story. That's ahead. In the U.S.,

national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts,

diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show show, Sources and Methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people

helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Inspiration for Nobel Prize-winning author Hong Kong's new novel came to her in a dream.

I could see the black tea trunks in the plane, and it was snowing.

It seemed like torso's arms and legs were cut off and I could see the barrier mounds more than tens of thousands of barrier mounds behind all the black torsos of the dead trees.

And like her chilling vision, we do not part as hauntingly dreamlike.

And it brings back pain and loss from Korean history.

It follows the narrator, Kyeong Ha, as a snowstorm, covers her island home and clouds her mind.

She gets an urgent request to save a friend's beloved white bird named Ami, and that friend is very far from home.

She's injured, so she is living in Seju Island in the very remote village, but because she was injured and she is now hospitalized in Seoul.

We become aware, as the story goes on, that at the heart of it is a massacre that occurred in

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