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“I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work than to drink palm-wine in my life.” So begins Amos Tutuola’s famed The Palm-Wine Drinkard, which came out in 1952 and is widely feted as the first West African novel in English published internationally.
more...Glory is a book at once comical and horrifying. Cynical and unforgiving, yet somehow hopeful in its last breaths, NoViolet Bulawayo’s second Booker Prize shortlisted novel is keen political commentary and formal innovation in one.
more...It took some time, but in the end, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won me over with its combination of absurd scenes, magical realism, and critical engagement with the civil war in Sri Lanka.
more...The Most Distant Memory of Men is a stirring celebration of literature. The novel mischievously holds up a mirror to the European literary establishment.
more...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.
more...Honorée Fanonne Jeffer’s first novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is extensive and demanding: The family history of the African American Ailey Pearl Garfield is traced back over several generations and reveals complicated family entanglements that are consequences of settler colonialism and enslavement.
more...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.
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