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SHORTLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2020 'A magnificent novel, full of wit, warmth and tenderness' Andrew McMillan 'Smart, serious and entertaining' Bernardine Evaristo How do you begin to find yourself when you only know half of who you are? As Nnenna Maloney approaches womanhood she longs to connect with her Igbo-Nigerian culture. Her once close and tender relationship with her mother, Joanie, becomes strained as Nnenna begins to ask probing questions about her father, who Joanie refuses to discuss. Nnenna is asking big questions of how to 'be' when she doesn't know the whole of who she is. Meanwhile, Joanie wonders how to love when she has never truly been loved. Their lives are fil...
'A beautiful exploration of grief and family, written in exquisite prose and told with compassion and tenderness.' Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half 'Tender and honest, pulsing with love. Nzelu is the future of Black British writing.' Derek Owusu, author of That Reminds Me From award-winning author Okechukwu Nzelu comes a spellbinding literary novel that asks, how do you move forward when the past keeps pulling you back? Achike Okoro feels like his life is coming together at last. His top-floor flat in Peckham is as close to home as he can imagine and after years of hard work, he's about to get his break as an actor. He's even persuaded his father, Chibuike, to move in with him, gra...
WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2020 ___________________________________ 'A singular achievement.' Michael Donkor, Guardian 'Heartbreaking, important and original.' Christie Watson, author of THE LANGUAGE OF KINDNESS 'Derek Owusu's writing is honest, moving, delicate, but tough. Once you lock on to his words, it is hard to break eye contact. A beautiful meditation on childhood, coming of age, the now, and the media. This work is heartfelt.' Benjamin Zephaniah 'Honest and beautiful.' Guy Gunaratne, author of IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY 'When writing is this honest, it soars. What an incredible use of language and truth.' Yrsa Daley-Ward ___________________________________ Anansi, your fou...
An anthology of powerful essays reflecting on the Black British male experience, collated and edited by Mostly Lit podcast host Derek Owusu. What is the experience of Black men in Britain? With continued conversation around British identity, racism and diversity, there is no better time to explore this question and give Black British men a platform to answer it. SAFE: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space is that platform. Including essays from top poets, writers, musicians, actors and journalists, this timely and accessible book brings together a selection of powerful reflections exploring the Black British male experience and what it really means to reclaim and hold space in the landscape ...
"Michael Kabongo is a British-Congolese teacher living in London on the cusp of two identities. On paper, he seems to have it all: He's beloved by his students, popular with his coworkers, and the pride and joy of a mother who emigrated from the Congo to the UK in search of a better life. But behind closed doors, he's been struggling with the overwhelming sense that he can't address the injustices he sees raging before him--from his relentless efforts to change the lives of his students for the better to his attempts to transcend the violence and brutality that marginalizes young Black men around the world. Then one day he suffers a devastating loss, and his life is thrown into a tailspin. A...
**WINNER OF THE MAYA ANGELOU AWARD** A Massachusetts Book Award "Fiction Honor" An extraordinary literary debut about a Nigerian boy's secret intersex identity and his desire to live as a girl. Oto leaves for boarding school with one plan: excel and escape his cruel home. Falling in love with his roommate was certainly not on the agenda, but fear and shame force him to hide his love and true self. Back home, weighed down by the expectations of their wealthy and powerful family, the love of Oto's twin sister wavers and, as their world begins to crumble around them, Oto must make drastic choices that will alter the family's lives for ever. Richly imagined with art, proverbs and folk tales, this moving and modern novel follows Oto through life at home and at boarding school in Nigeria, through the heartbreak of living as a boy despite their profound belief they are a girl, and through a hunger for freedom that only a new life in the United States can offer. An Ordinary Wonder is a powerful coming-of-age story that explores complex desires as well as challenges of family, identity, gender, and culture, and what it means to feel whole.
_______________ A pocket-sized, unmissable essay on the importance of children's literature by the bestselling and award-winning author, Katherine Rundell. _______________ 'It's a very short book but it packs a real punch... A real delight' - Financial Times 'Rundell is the real deal, a writer of boundless gifts and extraordinary imaginative power whose novels will be read, cherished and reread long after most so-called "serious" novels are forgotten' - Observer 'Rundell's pen is gold-tipped' - Sunday Times _______________ Katherine Rundell - Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and prize-winning author of five novels for children - explores how children's books ignite, and can re-ignite, the imagination; how children's fiction, with its unabashed emotion and playfulness, can awaken old hungers and create new perspectives on the world. This delightful and persuasive essay is for adult readers.
Address Book is the new work of fiction by the Costa-shortlisted author of Skin Lane. Neil Bartlett's cycle of stories takes us to seven very different times and situations: from a new millennium civil partnership celebration to erotic obsession in a Victorian tenement, from a council-flat bedroom at the height of the AIDS crisis to a doctor's living-room in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, they lead us through decades of change to discover hope in the strangest of places. 'Bartlett is a pioneer on and off the page and we are lucky to have him telling our stories' DAMIAN BARR 'One of England's finest writers' EDMUND WHITE
*An Evening Standard Must Read, Grazia Best Book of 2021 and Independent Debut Not to Miss* 'Beautifully written, this is a book of real hope and connection' Stylist Did you ever have a friend who made you see the world differently? Stan did, and his name was Charlie. They crossed paths by chance one day, cycling on Goshawk Common. Fearless, clever, older, Charlie was everything Stan - bullied and adrift after his father's death - wanted to be. Charlie taught Stan to ask questions, to stand on his own two feet. But could their friendship endure in a world that offered these two boys such different prospects? When the two meet again, as adults, the tables have turned, and while Stan is revelling in all the city has to offer, Charlie is the one struggling. But will Stan be there for the man who once showed him the meaning of loyalty?
Breanne Mc Ivor is a bold new voice in Caribbean fiction. The Trinidad of her stories is utterly contemporary but also a place defined by its folk mythologies and its cultural creations, its traditions of masking and disguises. Her stories confront the increasing economic and cultural divisions between rich and poor, the alarming rise in crime, murders and an alternative economy based on drug trafficking. Their daring is that they look both within the human psyche and back in time to make sense of this reality. The figure of the loup-garou, the violent rhetoric of the Midnight Robber - or even cannibalism lurking far off the beaten track - have become almost comic tropes of a dusty folklore....