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.

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.

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