"In the United States, at least, February is a time for remembering - the feats of Black communities in America, the lives of its greatest presidents, the plight of a single large frightened rodent, even love itself (and its various totems that you're expected to purchase). Vargas Llosa's last novel centers a professor seeking the soul of his country in music."
""Every true story is in the service of justice. You don't have to aim at justice; you just aim for the truth," Jones told me in 2019, just minutes after her previous novel, An American Marriage, won the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Judging just from back-cover synopses, Kin, Jones' first novel since that portrait of love caught in the grinder of mass incarceration, would seem more concerned with character and the complexities of friendship than Justice with a capital J."
February features several notable English-language book releases in the United States. Vargas Llosa's latest novel follows a professor seeking his country's soul through music; it was published in Spanish in 2023 and is now translated into English by Adrian Nathan West. Lauren Groff's Brawler is her third short-story collection and her first since Florida (a 2018 National Book Award finalist); its nine stories present varied perspectives including a high-school swimmer, a mother, and an heir. Tayari Jones's Kin concentrates on a friendship between two Black women and uses that relationship to illuminate a complex Southern generation while engaging themes of truth and justice.
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