As a staunch supporter of books reflecting the diversity of South Asian voices and experiences, I love that Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian is a story grounded in real life struggles bolstered by ancient magic and spirituality, history, and a nerve-jangling heist.
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I was curious to read Abdulrazak Gurnah’s latest novel – his first publication since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. Theft follows Karim, Fauzia, and Badar, who grow up between Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, become friends, and fall in love.
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Brotherless Night is an intimate and unforgettable story of a country and a family coming undone. It’s a novel about the early years of the civil war in Sri Lanka.
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For several months, I kept circling around the same book in my local bookshop. Some of the keywords on the back cover of Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s debut novel piqued my interest: Trinidad, Rastafari, cemetery, gravedigger, magical love story, family legend.
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I picked up up Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard at the beginning of this year – I’ll let you work out which events prompted me to reach for this book about a guy who garners a lot of adoring followers that sincerely believe he has the answers to everything – because as we know, books are a way of contextualizing the world.
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It is probably the most touching and authentic love story I have read in a long time. Open Water is the debut novel by British-Ghanian writer and photographer Caleb Azumah Nelson.
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The House of Broken Bricks is a sad and beautiful story about the cracks in the lives of the Hembrys, a mixed-race family in rural Somerset. It’s a family of four in a difficult situation and it seems like it’s going to break them. But maybe there is still a chance that they can somehow find their way back to each other?
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Why are there connections between the well-being of the people in New Orleans and Ibadan? How is the destructive hurricane in one place connected to the drying up river in the other? In Olufunke Grace Bankole’s sad and beautiful debut novel The Edge of Water, this is due to a disregarded prophecy.
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Rosarita, Desai’s newest novel, is the story of Bonita, a young Indian woman from New Delhi who has come to San Miguel, Mexico for Spanish immersion courses. One day in the Jardín, she is confronted by the woman Vicky who becomes The Stranger and later, The Trickster. The Stranger claims to have known Bonita’s mother, Sunita. Except, The Stranger calls her Rosarita. Rosarita, insists The Stranger, was once a great artist who had travelled from India to learn from the great painters of Mexico.
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Louise Kennedy’s story about the primary school teacher Cushla is set in 1975, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in a deeply divided Belfast.
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