An elephant never forgets

From a biography of Dickens to the age of empire’s brutality to animals, Martin Chilton shares his February highlights

- Martin Chilton

This month, a forgotten gem from 1983, Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding, gets a welcome republish from Penguin. I would also recommend Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons (Hamish Hamilton) and Nicola Rayner’s impressive and vibrant historical novel The Paris Dancer (Aria), set during the Second World War.

Fans of grisly history should check out Blessin Adams’s Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain (William Collins), an exploration of notorious murders that scared and titillated the British public while also challenging notions of gender.

Picks for the fiction, non-fiction and biography books out this month are reviewed in full below.

South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang offers a devastating indictment of her country’s past in the novel We Do Not Part (translated into English by E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris).

Protagonist Kyungha, who suffers from depression, migraines and abdominal spasms, is sparked into action when she receives an emergency call from her close friend Inseon, who is in hospital in Seoul after a horrific chainsaw injury. Even though a powerful storm is brewing, she pleads with Kyungha to travel to Jeju Island to rescue Amy, her beloved parrot.

Jeju is a place shrouded in death. In 1948, tens of thousands of civilians, including Inseon’s relatives, were slaughtered there by South Korean forces. In her arduous journey to retrieve Amy, Kyungha battles blinding snow and is wracked by anxiety. The desolate setting is captured by Han with skill in what becomes a tale of pain, endurance and a quest for catharsis in an indifferent world.