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.
Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman is the perfect book for fans of the series Grace and Frankie. It’s the story of an older gay couple in love, a rollercoaster ride of emotions between secrecy and coming out, lightened up by extremely funny characters.
Jessica George’s debut novel Maame has the air of being the well-behaved little sister to Candice Carty-Williams Queenie. Like Queenie, Maddie, the protagonist, goes through crises and explores her sexuality, but she is – perhaps because of the Christian upbringing in her Ghanaian family home – far less reckless.
With Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams became known for the humour and effortlessness of her tone. She managed to incorporate important issues such as racism and mental health into her novel despite its superficial lightness. People Person, her second novel, is only similar in style and tone.
Black Cake is Charmaine Wilkerson’s moving debut novel in which two estranged siblings, Byron and Benny, must come to terms with their mother’s death and their hidden past.
The first thing I liked about this book was its title, and the novel certainly delivers on the sensuous and sensory promises made by these four words placed alongside each other: Butter, honey, pig, bread.
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.
A complex and frank story unfolds set in 1830s London, tracing a series of strange murders in which the victims are beheaded. Amir Ali from India becomes entangled in the happenings and explains his perspective of things.
This essay is the third in a four-part series on Afropolitanism and literature. Brian Chikwava has not written a theoretical treatise on Afropolitanism. But his novel Harare North has been much discussed in the context of Afropolitanism.