Your Shelf Life: 5 Books to Read in February

Min Jin Lee’s successor to her critical hit Free Food for Millionaires is a story of a Korean family in Japan. Pachinko follows a woman shunned by her family when she becomes pregnant, forcing her into a marriage and exile.

George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo unfolds over a single night after the death of President Lincoln’s son Willie. The young Lincoln enters a purgatory and meets characters who allow Saunders to explore philosophical questions.

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Like she did in her best-selling novel Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline mixes historical fact and fiction in A Piece of the World. It tells the story of Christina Olson, the enigmatic muse of American painter Andrew Wyeth.

Revisit Fidel Castro’s ascendancy in Castro’s Cuba. Journalist Lee Lockwood got incredible access to Castro and photographed Cuba in the ’60s for this art book, relevant again after the revolutionary’s recent death.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection The Refugees explores the split existence of those between worlds, like a Vietnamese refugee living with two gay men in San Francisco.

Your Shelf Life: 5 Books to Read in February