[6] The novel follows a woman named Kyungha, who lives alone in Seoul, as her long-time friend, Inseon, calls her from one of the city's hospitals after a work incident.

[9] The republic ultimately formed after May, and afterward, the newly elected Syngman Rhee moved to militarily suppress rebel violence on Jeju Island with support from the United States.

In her lecture delivered as a laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Han stated,Whereas, until the autumn of 2021, when We Do Not Part was published, I had considered these two problems to be the ones at my core: Why is the world so violent and painful?

[13]After writing Human Acts, Han experienced a series of "haunting" nightmares involving countless dark tree trunks, set against a snowy landscape that was being swallowed by the sea.

[20] Son Yun-seo wrote, for Sideview, that Han was able to powerfully articulate the Jeju massacre as an unforgettable tragedy that still deserved attention in the present day.

He then compared Han's writing style to that of Yasunari Kawabata and W. G. Sebald and observed the novel's "strange and sometimes disturbing atmosphere, a kind of gentle, muffled space between fantasy and reality... all sorts of images and dreams.

[28] Also in a starred review, Publishers Weekly called the book "an indelible exploration of Korea’s historical traumas" in its tackling of the Jeju massacre, which took place from 1948 to 1949, and remarked on the "dreamy yet devastating prose" rendered by Han and translated by e. and Morris.

"[29] Many publications, like The Atlantic and The Boston Globe, remarked on Han's further tackling of South Korean history in a similar fashion to Human Acts.

[30][31] Leigh Haber, writing for the Los Angeles Times, called We Do Not Part an "exquisite and profoundly disquieting latest novel" and found "no answers" in Han's mysterious, eerie, and haunting narrative.

Haber also observed that "Han's prose is translucent, shot through with poetic turns" and found a "reportorial tone" in the sections where Inseon's narrates her family's experiences of the Jeju massacre.

[32] People's World lauded Han's mention of the American involvement in the Jeju massacre, writing: "This novel not only reveals the emotional toll that Human Acts took on the author but also deepens and expands on the theme of government aggression, torture, and widespread killings.

"[33] Hannah Bae, writing for Datebook, observed Han's interplay between reality and dream, life and death, and past and present through "leaps between narrators, time, place and states of being."

"[34] Many English-language publications in the west highly anticipated the release of We Do Not Part, as it marked Han's first English translation since her awarding of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.