In a grazing pasture on the North side of what was once the campus of the Nickel Academy for Boys, an archaeology student from the University of Florida stumbles across a field of bones: unmarked graves. She and her cohort are there to excavate the official graveyard of the school before the lands are developed into an office park. The small bones in the known cemetery are already suspiciously often fractured, suggesting breaks and injuries before death: what history of abuses does the field of unmarked bones testify to? Thus begins Colson Whitehead’s prizewinning novel The Nickel Boys.
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If you’ve read an introduction to antiracist thinking already, Amjahid’s new book provides further insights and possible options for action in order to critically deal with one’s own position – especially as a white person.
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Megha Majumdar’s debut novel, A Burning, is a highly political – and at times disturbing – story about the desire for a life worth living, about power and corruption.
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Florence Brokowski-Shekete was arguably the first Black German school district director. In her autobiographical work, Mist, die versteht mich ja! Aus dem Leben einer Schwarzen Deutschen (“Damn, she can understand me! From the Life of a Black German”), she recounts how she came to hold this position.
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Saidiya Hartman is a Cultural Historian and Literary Scholar whose work explores histories of slavery and its afterlives primarily in a North American context. Her vantage point for writing is oftentimes fraught and incomplete archival records that eclipse and overdetermine Black subjects’ histories.
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Adas Raum is ambitious and epic in scope, gripping and intelligent in execution, and somehow both unforgiving and funny. It will let you meet Ada in her different iterations through the ages, as well as God in a number of irreverent and charismatic guises
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Her book Why We Matter: The End of Oppression brings together Emilia Roig’s far-ranging body of knowledge. Moving at a rapid pace, the book takes a look at the multiple facets of oppression in nearly all areas of life. Why We Matter can thus be read as a wonderfully accessible introduction to the concept of intersectionality.
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Identitti is Mithu Sanyal’s first novel. I was very much looking forward to this book, and I was not at all disappointed: it examines an identity scandal from all sides with nuance and – despite all seriousness – humour.
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Nuruddin Farah’s latest novel North of Dawn explores the theme of migration and how settling in a new country is affected by people’s educational background, religion and worldview.
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Addiction and family, religion and science, being Ghanaian in Alabama: these are some of the issues that Yaa Gyasi’a second novel Transcendent Kingdom confronts. Written from the perspective of Gifty, now a talented biomedical researcher at a prestigious US university, this is the story of the loss of a charismatic brother to opioid addiction, and the complex aftermath of this trauma for those he leaves behind.
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