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, a genre I am not particularly partial to, but which I will read in smaller volumes. One Hundred Years…
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, now there is this goal. This was more of an assigned reading on a writing class I am taking.…
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 clear backdrop of the history of the war, and brings with it a clear explanation to some of the…
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 Elegy for Easterly, published in 2009. Suddenly I am all about this author. At the book launch her self-deprecating…
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 in the beginning, in the middle, at the end, and everywhere in between. At one point my husband just…
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. Effia is married off to a white British slave trader and lives a comfortable life at “the Castle” –…
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 study of race relations in the very polarised Cape Town, as the blurb promised. It was, to some extent,…
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 subject matter. I surprisingly I enjoyed it. Steven Robbins maps out his family’s history in this book. An exploration…
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 was heart-wrenching, it was the epilogue,written by his wife, that had me crying like a baby. She is as…
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 occupied particular high echelons in society in the sixties, but in its revelations of the extent to which this…