It's a summer of new films for Laia Marull, who has had films on the bill for a few weeks now. Laura Mañá's comedy The irresponsible ones and on September 5th the rural drama will premiere The black earth, by Alberto Morais. Between promotions, the Barcelona actress devours The impossible goodbyes (La Magrana, translated by Héctor Bofill and Hye Young Yu), the novel by South Korean Nobel Prize winner Han Kang about a woman who must go to a friend's house to take care of her bird while she is in the hospital. The house is on Jeju Island, where the protagonist discovers the traumatic past of her friend's family, which is also South Korea's: a massacre in which more than ten thousand people were killed. "The truth is that it is not a book for the summer, but more for the winter," says Marull. "I haven't finished it yet, but I am fascinated. It is a novel that pricks your soul from the first moment, and I am enjoying it very much."

This is the last novel translated into Catalan by the winner of the last Nobel Prize for Literature, South Korean writer Han KangA book that relates to all of the author's books, but especially to Human acts, because it also delves—with as much force as delicacy—into the traumatic past of Korean history. In this case, the bloody episode at the heart of it all is a massacre that took place on Jeju Island, in the northernmost part of the country, in which more than ten thousand people were murdered. It was a true barbarity perpetrated by police and military personnel against a popular uprising of peasants who rejected the division of Korea into two countries. It was 1948, and some historians place this episode as one of the preludes to the Korean War, which began two years later. Needless to say, the entire massacre took place with the knowledge of the US Army, which already controlled the territory.