Title: Talk of the Town Author: Fred Khumalo Publisher: Kwela Books Published: 2019 Genre: Fiction In this collection of short stories, Khumalo tackles the ideas of South African identity and of belonging by routinely detailing the…
Title: Heads of the Colored People Author: Nafissa Thompson-Spires Publisher: Chatto & Windus (Penguin Random House imprint) Published: 2018 Genre: Fiction And what is a black network narrative but the story of one degree of…
Title: Educated Author: Tara Westover Publisher: Penguin Random House Published: 2018 Genre: Memoir In Educated, Tara Westover recounts her childhood about growing up as the youngest of seven children in a Mormon survivalist family. Not only…
Title: Lullaby Author: Leila Slimani Publisher: Faber & Faber Published: 2016 Genre: Fiction Leila Slimani’s psychological thriller about a family nanny that murders the two children she minds is an interesting exploration of human fragility and instability.…
Title: The Good Immigrant Author: edited by Nikesh Shukla Publisher: Unbound Published: 2016 Genre: Non-Fiction The blurb reads: ‘What’s it like to live in a country that doesn’t trust you and doesn’t want you unless you…
Title: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows Author: Balli Kaur Jaswal Publisher: HarperCollins Published: 2017 Genre: Fiction Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is, as the title states, just that. The stories told by a group of Punjabi…
Title: HOME FIRE Author: Kamila Shamsie Publisher: Bloomsbury Published: 2017 Genre: Fiction Kamila Shamsie’s book is a tale of two families’ lives in this retelling of the tragedy Antigone by Sophocles (which I had to educate…
Title: An American Marriage Author: Tayari Jones Publisher: Oneworld Published: 2018 Genre: Fiction Tayari Jones has written a love story that is tender and heartbreaking in equal measure. Celestial and Roy are your average educated, upper-middle-class,…
I have always thought that the first book I’d read by Gabriel García Márquez would be One Hundred Years of Solitude. To be honest One Hundred Years intimidates me. This is the tome to Magic Realism,…
Title: The Lover Author: Marguerite Duras Genre: Memoir Published: First published in 1986 I am reading Modern Classics this month. As if my reading ambitions were already not lofty enough, along with #reading SA, #reading Africa,…
Half of a Yellow Sun is about the Biafra war of the late 1960s. A war that was fought between Nigeria and the newly formed Biafra Republic following its secession from Nigeria. The book provides a…
I had just finished Petina Gappah’s first novel, The Book of Memory when I got an invitation to the launch of her recently published collection of short stories – Rotten Row, which follows from her first collection, An…