A “meditation on colour” which features a list of white objects has been longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
The 2018 prize, for a book translated into English and published in the UK, pits 13 novels against each other.
It includes The White Book by Han Kang, who won the prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian.
The author, from South Korea, has written a story in which a woman moves to a European city and is haunted by the story of her older sister, who died two hours after birth.
Judges said the book is about “mourning, rebirth and the tenacity of the human spirit”.
“As she (the narrator) contemplates the child’s short life, she focuses on the whiteness and all it symbolises.
“The White Book is a meditation on colour, beginning with a list of white things” such as salt, snow and sugar cubes.
The £50,000 prize is divided equally between the author and the translator.
The shortlist is announced on April 12 and the winner on May 22.
Novelists from France, Spain, Germany, Argentina, Hungary, Austria, Iraq, Poland and Taiwan have made the longlist.
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