This novel begins with a woman writer in Seoul, still shaken by earlier trauma, who receives an urgent request from a friend. She travels to Jeju Island to help, and the journey becomes a passage through snow, memory and fear. The book draws on the island's painful history of mass killings in the late 1940s and its effect on one family. With a dreamlike, haunting style, it explores grief, friendship and the duty to remember, and holds to the idea that love may endure beyond loss.