A Passage North
A Passage North takes its readers along on a contemplative journey through a Sri Lanka traumatised by a decades long civil war.
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Babel
In the Old Testament, the story of The Tower of Babel is told: in reaction to the hubris of humankind, God spreads people across the world and muddles up their languages. The barriers to understanding thus become the penalty for humankind’s hubris. R. F. Kuang’s Babel takes place in a similar time of human arrogance: in 1836, Oxford – with its fictive Royal Institute for Translation, informally known as Babel – is at the centre of the British Empire.
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Issa
Issa, who lives in Frankfurt am Main, is pregnant and desperate. The situation with her child’s father is complicated as is with her mother. No longer knowing what to do, and at the urging of her mother, she flies to see her grandmother and great-grandmother in Cameroon.
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The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) is one of the most widely known postcolonial novels. It won the Booker Prize in 1997 and has been translated into more than forty languages.
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Sunday Buttered Toast
Last night around ten o’clock, Jess drank a mug of Horlicks with a Hershey’s Kiss dropped inside, scavenged from an expired bag she found in a cabinet. It was white and fossilized by now, but with some vigorous stirring, she managed to melt it into a blob which she ate at the end with a vanilla cream wafer biscuit.
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Triangulum
With his second novel, Masande Ntshanga moves into speculative fiction. Triangulum offers a critical commentary on how colonial and apartheid regimes of segregation have ongoing effects in the postapartheid present of Ntshanga’s writing.
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Woman, Eating
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda highlights just how monstrous the human world that the vampire inhabits can truly be. It’s also a food lover’s delight that gives us a peek into the complicated identities that can inhabit individual bodies and how time and history can affect them, but it’s not intimidating.
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Assembly
As the title of Natasha Brown’s debut novel suggests, it amounts to a coming-together, an assembling. A Black British woman attends a party for an upper-class white family. This celebration in rural England is the culmination of her inner dilemmas: has she made it or are her actions making her an accomplice to the racism she experiences? At this party, she makes up her mind.
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