poco.lit.‘s top 5 picks in 2022
The editors of poco.lit. share their favorite books of 2022 – five novels by incredibly talented writers from around the world
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The God Child
Nana Oforiatta Ayim’s prose in her debut novel The God Child feels like poetry: vivid, associative, beautiful – and sometimes a little confusing. The story navigates between Ghana, Germany and the UK, following its young protagonist Maya from childhood to her early twenties, and is a narrative rich in history, complicity and complicated relationships.
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Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman presents a careful meditation on histories of slavery and complicity.
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Transcendent Kingdom
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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the things I am thinking while smiling politely
The novella treads a complex and delicate line in its negotiation of personal wrongs and structural injustices as they collide and intersect.
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Afropolitanism as identity: Taiye Selasi
This essay is the first in a four-part series on Afropolitanism and literature. Taiye Selasi was one of the first people to introduce the term Afropolitanism and uses it to describe her identity.
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Homegoing
Ein eindrucksvolles und bewegendes Buch darüber, wie Kolonialismus, Versklavung und Rassismus viele Generationen einer ghanaisch-amerikanischen Familie prägt.
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