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Leila Mottley became the youngest author ever to make the Booker Prize longlist this year. Her novel Nightcrawling follows a protagonist, Kiara, who is only slightly younger and struggles to survive and find shelter in Oakland. This novel is important, but also heavy stuff!
more...The Impostor is an exciting book that offers insights into a complex reality. It is set in a time shortly after the end of apartheid; South Africa is in transition.
more...August Gondiwindi has been washing dishes in miserable grey London for ten years, when the death of her grandfather Albert causes her to journey home to Massacre Plains in Australia. Thus begins the story told by Tara June Winch in The Yield: a book both very beautiful and very sad.
more...Tanya Tagaq, an Indigenous Canadian, is a multi-award-winning throat singer and experimental musician. She grew up in Ikaluktutiak, Nunavut and published her first and to date only book Split Tooth in 2018.
more...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.
more...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.
more...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.
more...A listicle of five books set in Nigeria it’s worth checking out – from classics to less well-known newcomers, there’s some great reading here.
more...Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut novel tells the story of the Ganguli family: Ashoke and Ashima, originally from Bengal, migrate to the North-eastern United States in the 1960s. They have two children there, and the novel follows the experiences of their firstborn son. It’s a novel about living in between places, cultures and assigned identities.
more...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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