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 heart breaking in equal measure. Celestial and Roy are your average educated,…
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…
I am still trying to get the right vocabulary on how best to describe Hanya Yanagihara’s 724-page tome on struggle. Not a struggle of the political kind, but a life filled with unrelenting sorrow. I cried…
Homegoing is a work of fiction about a family history that spans two continents, the North America and Africa. It is the story of half sisters: Effia and Esi whose lives take on very disparate paths.…
Title: The Woman Next Door Author: Yewande Omotoso Published: 2016 Genre: Fiction When I bought this book, I thought that I would be drawn into an exploration of the differing views of the main characters. A…
Title: Letters of Stone: From Nazi Germany to South Africa Author: Steven Robins Published: 2015 Genre: Memoir This book was a Book Club, which I must admit I would not have ordinarily read because of the…
Title: When Breath Becomes Air Author: Paul Kalanithi Published: 2015 Genre: Memoir Paul Kalanithi’s memoir is heartbreaking. I read this in two days and it left me emotionally exhausted. But it was not his writing that…
Title: Negroland – A memoir Author: Margo Jefferson Published: 2015 Genre: Memoir This book was an eye-opener. It was revelatory in not only its analysis of the upper-class world of educated, wealthy and accomplished African-Americans who…