Euronews Culture Book Club: Four picks for February

February is the shortest month of the year, so none of the books we’ve suggested are particularly tome-like in form. Instead, here’s a selection of lithe yet perfectly put together pieces of prose to settle into as you weather the month’s long winter nights.

Fiction: “We Do Not Part” by Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris

Last year’s Nobel Prize winner Han Kang made history as the first Asian woman to win the prize. Any English-language reader of hers will know how deserved the acclaim is from the way she effortlessly puts her critique of South Korean society into a sparse prose style in novels like “The Vegetarian” and “The White Book”.

Han returns to English-language shelves with her latest novel “We Do Not Part”. Thanks to her growing international renown, this is the fastest time it’s taken for one of her novels to be translated.

Published in its original Korean in 2021, “We Do Not Part” also represents the first time Han has broken from her English-language translator Deborah Smith, with whom she shared the International Booker Prize in 2016 for “The Vegetarian”. “We Do Not Part” has been translated into English by Emily Yae Won (stylised as e. yaewon) and Paige Aniyah Morris.

The novel follows Kyungha, a young woman in Seoul who braves the elements to reach Jeju Island where her hospital bed-bound friend Inseon is desperate for someone to feed her pet bird before it dies. As Kyungha makes the treacherous journey, she will discover Inseon’s troubling family past and their link to the massacre that took place on the island in 1949.

Non-fiction: “Resistance” by Steve McQueen

A history book and an exhibition in one, “Resistance” is an exploration of the ways acts of resistance have shaped the UK over a century.

Turner Prize-winning artist and Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen has spent his career inspecting the ways politics and individuals interact, whether it was in his spellbinding TV series Small Axe, his documentary Occupied City, or films like 12 Years a Slave. “Resistance” carries on that tradition with photographs and firsthand accounts of historic moments, starting with the 1903 radical suffrage movement to the Iraq War protests in 2003.

Along the way, McQueen’s expertly curated selection of archive photographs and historical records bring the importance of key protest movements such as the Battle of Cable Street, the Black People’s Day of Action, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and the Miners’ Strike into focus.

But this book doesn’t stand alone. Coinciding with its release, there will be an exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK. Running from 22 February to 1 June, the exhibition will feature much of the work McQueen has featured in the book, alongside even more insight into events such as the Black People’s Day of Action on 2 March 1981, following the house fire at 439 New Cross Road that claimed 13 lives.

Food for thought: “The Netanyahus” by Joshua Cohen

January saw the agreement of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, hopefully putting an end to the violence that started with the October 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel in 2023 and continued with the IDF’s bombardment of Gaza. As both sides release prisoners and hostages back home, it’s a good time to read up on the long-running conflict.

There is a wealth of literature discussing Israel and Palestine’s geopolitical relations. This month will see the release of “The World after Gaza” in which Indian writer Pankaj Mishra inspects both the history that lead up to past year’s conflict, as well as deconstructing the competing narratives around the subject and how the world will move on afterwards.

To take a slightly different tact with our recommendation though, we’re putting forward the novel “The Netanyahus” by Joshua Cohen. While not a strict historical account, it retells the story of Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s childhood visit to Cornell University when his father was interviewed for a position by the literary critic Harold Bloom.

Winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2022, “The Netanyahus” is a searing comic novel that peers behind the psychology of an abrasive man’s approach to Judaism, Zionism and America. That this man would ultimately become the father figure of the architect of Israel’s current position on the world stage only makes the novel’s observations keener.

Revisit this classic: “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole

It’s been a tough start to the year in America, hasn’t it? As fans of the newly inaugurated president seem desperate to show off their allegiance through salutes-that-are-definitely-not-Nazi-salutes, maybe it would be helpful to take a trip back through the annals of literature to find the original incel.

Before Musk, there was Ignatius J. Reilly. Perambulating around New Orleans, Reilly is a law unto himself. He slobbers, argues with his mother, and proselytises over niche religious scholars.

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As Reilly is forced onto his Odyssean adventure of becoming gainfully employed, author John Kennedy Toole populates the novel with insight into one of literature’s maddest and most unconventionally irreverent characters. In many ways the progenitor of the current internet-dwelling maniacs, Toole could be accused of making Reilly too sympathetic as “A Confederacy of Dunces” is one of the 20th century’s great comic novels.

Sadly, Toole never lived to see the prolonged success of his ambitious masterpiece. Published after his death by suicide, “A Confederacy of Dunces” becomes more relevant every year.