My brother looked at the blurb and said it sounds like a cross between Tyler Perry and TD Jakes which is funny cos it’s as far from that as literarily possible. Easily the most erudite fiction I’ve read this year, not just the cultural references (dance, classical music, poetry, Russian literature) but there’s something scientific about how the characters and their relationships are established.

It’s set in Iowa (where Taylor was part of thee most prestigious writing MFA) and it’s a novel, but not. Each ‘chapter’ could stand alone as a story (sidenote: interlinked short stories are my absolute #1 fav) and follows a loose group of friends in their final year of studies. The main characters (poet, dancers, aspiring banker) and their partners, lovers, friends are all so cool? I mean Taylor is cool so it makes sense but I guess it’s just lovely to read characters that you want to exist in real life, with all their baggage. That kind of careful attention paid to figuring out your career-vibe, who your people are, how you’re trying to move in the world? I love that for them, want that for everyone.

There’s petty bitchiness and kindness in spades, and setting-wise: nothing feels dated, it’s very realistically a campus novel without corny references. But the most impressive thing is how class dynamics act as the real setting, how the characters’ differences in material wealth shape their relationships as they all grapple with the question of who gets to make art and who doesn’t. Sex also looms large, mostly not exactly pleasant, and while it’s often bleak it’s neither lewd nor depressing. Most of the sex scenes are between men, the one with a woman made me think about how black gay writers do the most justice to black female characters, writing so capaciously that it makes me want to cry. One day I‘ll find the words to adequately talk about this 🖤

A short reading history of my latest obsession:

I bought a book of Italian short stories at the airport in Sardinia (I love this Penguin series, my other fav is the Japanese anthology). The stories are very good but one by Natalia Ginzburg (“My Husband”) completely winded me. This is what I hope for in an anthology: one story by a writer I don’t know that makes me feel like I NEED to to read every single thing they’ve ever written or I’ll never know peace again.

I got my hands on her collected stories and read them thinking that I’d learn Italian just for her. They’re unbelievable. Like, subordinate clause for what? She wastes no words, sentences clean as a bone, stories like bombs.

Moved onto novels, starting with “Family Lexicon” which is autobiographical and FUNNY. It feels like the Sunday lunch banter at the kind of family where everyone is a character, in the idiomatic sense. The humor of her family portrait holds hands with the heaviness: her family was very active in Italy’s anti-Fascist movement and the impact of the German occupation was tragic.

Next novel was “The Dry Heart” which is actually a novella, you can read it overnight, so terse that I happily put off sleep to feel with the protagonist, stuck in a bad marriage that could be used in Feminism 101 as a case study of an actual horror story. It’s so strange, so superb. Like, I can’t wait to read it again.

But there are unread novels and plays waiting to be devoured (next on my list is “The Little Virtues”) so the obsession continues 😍

Recent reads AKA books I can’t/won’t stop talking about:

1. “Babel” is already my most recommended book of 2023. Set at Oxford, it’s a fast fantasy about student revolution, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. It’s incredible.

2. “The Ministry for the Future” has taught me more about climate science than my entire PhD. Not sure what this says about my self-study skills but def says a lot about how well-researched this novel is. It’s a cli-fi novel about a (fictional) Zurich-based UN agency set up to stave off climate collapse, told from different perspectives. Think dodgy politicians, petro-state billionaires, tragic weather events, ambitious geoengineering and guerrilla tactics. Listen, it’s detail-heavy and not always fun reading but surprisingly less depressing than expected. Also learnt loads about Switzerland and Swissness.

3. “The Priory of the Orange Tree” another fantasy but more delicious, featuring luscious queer romance and dragon battles. Already salivating for the just-released prequel!

4. “The Loss Library” will be reread for the rest of my life. Huge fan of Vladislavic, here he looks at a selection of stories he didn’t write, how the ideas arose and why he abandoned them. A short story Masterclass.

5. “Novelist as a Vocation” I love reading about writers’ habits and discipline generally so I enjoyed this as much his previous nonfiction about marathon running. Everyone loves Murakami and this is a great collection of essays to make you feel like you *know* him.

I first got into Ottessa Moshfegh via her mad short stories but her novels? Each has been weirder (better) than the last. There’s something fantasy-like about how far out her characters are: usually isolated women who further isolate themselves from their bizarre realities. I highly recommend “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”.

“Lapnova” is different because this time the main character is a motherless teenage boy, isolated in the most unique ways imaginable. The son of a shepherd, 13-year-old-Marek lives in Lapnova, a fictional medieval village. It’s a cruel, cruel life. I’ve never been more grateful to live in the time that do. Everything is gross. No knights in shining armour just the ruthless misery of feudalism. It’s like House of the Dragon, but there’s one lord and he’s so casually merciless that dragons seem infinitely preferable. The people of Lapnova are totally yoked to a horrible life of miserable work and obsessive religion, while the lord and his lackey, the village, live in depraved luxury.

There’s the dreary day to day life but also the despair of drought and famine.There’s a blind village witch who miraculously nurses all the babies in the village. Bandits. Botched abortions. Obsessive religious self flagellation. All this seems depressing, but the plot twists so good they seem like a product of the occult and the language is crisp as a green apple.

I like Mosfegh because she has this wanton abandon (like: let’s push these characters to the absolute grossest level imaginable) that works really well with plots that can seem pointless and meandering until the very end when they leave you winded. I also love that all her novels seem determined to force readers to greedily face moments that feel morally repulsive? A full cast of unlikeable characters means constantly deciding between disdain or sympathy, amusement or aversion. Nothing can be skimmed, these are characters meant to linger. And while this book really emphasizes the grotesque, it never feels gratuitous.

It has the feeling of a fable couched in a cabinet of horrors, making for a really compelling combo of religion, communities, power, and the stories that weave the three together

This is a wild, wild read. It follows a young Black woman who gets involved with a middle-aged white man in an open marriage, then moves in with his family. Her relationship with his wife (and adopted Black daughter) is infinitely more interesting than her romance with him, or him generally.

Firstly, it’s so good and worth every word of hype. Imagine being taught/ mentored/ read by Zadie. Gosh how lucky, but also what pressure? And then to deliver so spectacularly? Amazing truly. Secondly, it’s so American? I had returned to bell hooks “the oppositional gaze” for PhD while reading this and it was cool to have an acute awareness of myself as a young Black woman while reading a book by/about someone I should ostensibly relate to, and thinking about what does/doesn’t/can’t resonate with me and why.

The protagonist, Edie, is 23, so I often felt geriatric but I also thought a lot about Megan Nolan’s “Acts of Desperation”, since it follows a similar kind of “millennial fiction” mould about an insane love life. I related to that narrative very differently (having experienced being mad in love before I was ready to be) but maybe also because I didn’t have a default expectation that I should relate? There’s definitely something to be said about an ingrained expectation that black America will intuitively resonate.

That said, the writing is delicious, fast and flawless with killer lines like Edie’s pre date pep talk: “You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing”. Also loads of brilliant observations about class differences, being Black in all-white spaces, married couples, mindless mediocrity and actively pursuing passion, but I guess my favorite takeaway was how it made me think differently about domesticity, how some homes need to be wrecked and how real, meaningful support can come from the most unlikely sources.

I had read 2 stories before getting my hands on this (I’ve been trying for a long time to get a copy) so I kinda had an inkling of what was coming. I also had a horrible 3 day migraine that forced me to lie in the dark and avoid screens. So naturally I read greedily. Safe to say, my psyche has been scalded. How to describe these stories, other than exquisite? Well, queer in all senses. So many genres that it feels almost interdisciplinary. So beautiful. So painful. Also, I’d sell my soul for magical realism alone, but the fact of there also being elements of horror, comedy, fantasy and sci fi means I’m a fan for life. I feel haunted somehow? At some point I had to phone a loved one for grounding, the stories were taking me to weird places and it was scary, but so so wonderful.

I wrote about this book for New Frame and can’t hype it enough. It’s the kind of book we should have read in high school history, and I really hope it gets included in current curricula. But also, it’s a really gripping read outside of educational formats.

@valavoosh is a historian for the people, I first started following her because of her awesomely absorbing Twitter threads. This is her debut book, it documents Black Consciousness leader Mapetla Mohapi’s remarkable life and death in detention, and his widow Nohle Mohapi-Mbetshu’s fight for justice. It is an attempt to bring Mapetla Mohapi to life by shining a much-needed light on both a man who was more than his death and a woman who is more than her grief.

The writing is really accessible so it’s a great way to learn more about student activism in the 1970s away from the major cities of Cape Town and Joburg. It’s also a wonderful way to access Black Consciousness thinking and theory, and she does a great job of grappling with what this legacy means in and for South Africa. For me, the best part is the care that she writes about historical trauma and her really important efforts to counter the erasure of Black women’s experiences in historical accounts.

Read full review here

If I had to choose someone to rewrite the Bible, it would be Marlon James. Not because I’m trying to remix holy texts but because this is like proverbs, psalms and revelations in one but sexy, imbued with the most incredible lyricism ever. There are sorceresses and shape shifters and love and violence, really rich reading that imagination-wise feels like being in the IMAX theatre. It’s heady. Like, you need a glass of water between chapters to avoid reeling.

James won the Booker for A Brief History of Seven Killings, about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley. I couldn’t get into it but I fell hard for his next book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf. This is the sequel to that, the second in a gloriously gory fantasy trilogy. It’s full of swearing and sex and often feels like a real time decolonization of the painfully straight-white-male vibes of fantasy as a genre.

It’s tempting to pig out in fantasy novels, to just devour at once but his writing style forces a slow down to appreciate the multiple voices and timescales and poetry tangled in the prose. He plays lots of tricks, like calling the same character different names in the same paragraph. The series has been described as an African Game of Thrones, fantasy on steroids and apparently the third instalment veers into horror. I was rapt with book one and already at the edge of my seat in anticipation for the finale.

Still thinking about how every page of this novel is a poem. I am careful with poetry, I don’t binge on it like I do short stories or novels because often I get overwhelmed or just don’t get it at all so it was delightful to read with reckless abandon and feel like this novel has the best of both forms. Beautiful, and necessarily discomfiting.

The novel moves between South Africa and New Zealand (forever a fan of stories that straddle) with a protagonist from each. Mary, a drifting teenager from Durban and Nepukaneja, a Māori elder on a mission, are an unlikely pairing and it’s hard to talk about them without plot-spoiling. Rugby-obsessed, braai-loving immigrant community struggling to adjust to their new country meets indignant indigenous struggle for rights is so ridiculous that it’s brilliant.

I mean, I have zero lus for white South Africans who cast themselves as crime refugees. It goes against all my political fiber. That said, I realized while reading that I generally avoid disaffected white South Africans (and their narratives) like the plague. I’m not saying this book changed that aversion, more like the caricatures of expatriates made me laugh and cry, like full characters moving along strong plots usually do. So the author did a thing, moving my stone cold heart against its own prejudice.

It was also really cool to learn more about Māori culture and perceptions of South African immigrants (only white ones tho. Side note: it would be great to read about Black, Coloured and Indian South Africans in Oz or NZ). Anyway, it’s a really rich reflection on dislocation and dispossession, of home and of self.

Wolfed it down in January but it’s been hard to talk coherently about it. One because I’ve been gushing - ranting cos I want everyone to read it but also rambling cos I don’t wanna plot spoil. Two, there’s a lot of charm to having read it while I was in Cape Town, I needed some time to let the magic of that settle inside me. Three, so much has been happening but I’m thinking of a tweet by Ilya Kaminsky, writing to a friend in Ukraine about how to help and he replied “Putins come and go.. send us some poems and essays.” If that isn’t a motivation to write about literature!

The novel is set between Cape Town and Shanghai and man I love a story that straddles. The plot follows Beth, an anti-apartheid student activist who ends up working in government. She accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai, and the novel is about both her historic and new friendships, and their accompanying intrigues. While globetrotting, the book also time-travels between contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, New York, Japan and China during both the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising. It’s a busy book, a lot happening but somehow, there are these moments of stillness that made me think a lot about how personal life and public duty overlap.

For the past few weeks, I stared straight at the charred roof of the parliament building and I don’t wanna get too sentimental about it but like yikes! It was helpful to have the company of a gripping story that connects the relatively recent past to now with a light (political) hand while offering really gorgeous granular attention to detail. Also the characters are great, it was easy to imagine knowing all of them and they really reminded me how much has been (and continues to be) gained and lost by young people in SA, China, everywhere really.

Update: interviewed CA Davids for New Frame and loved every minute. Read here.

I reviewed this beautiful essay collection for New Frame, and reading it was special but interviewing the editors was even better (so graceful, so generous) but the best part was this response from Gabeba Baderoon:

"Thank you for this gorgeous review! It’s thoughtful, subtle, chooses where to look just beautifully and is exquisitely written. Thank you so much! It sets a very high standard for any reviews to follow!"

She has long been a hero of mine so my heart nearly burst out of my chest, but even if she wasn't, this is exactly the kind of response that I strive for. I just figure, if I write about someone else's work and perchance they read it, I hope that they feel a sliver of what I did and get to enjoy a tiny shiver of delight reading about their own work.

Read it here
 

I reviewed Teju Cole’s photobook Fernweh for the Johannesburg Review of Books and ended up reviewing Switzerland too. My first time publishing in there and my first time writing about here. 

Read it here

My favourite thing about Zadie Smith is how much I love her. I don’t know how to explain it other than this. Of course, she writes beautifully. Her fiction is fast and fun. She’s a fantastic cultural critic and her commentary always feels like just the right balance of glamorous and geeky, critical and kind. But still, I like best this feeling that she is for me. I’m sure everyone who loves her feels this way.

She started writing this essay collection around the time the COVID-19 pandemic began in the US and completed it soon after the murder of George Floyd. The collection is neat and trim. Six essays, most only six or seven pages long, usually set in New York or London and often centered on portraits of people from either city that act like people-portals to her musings on all the madness of now.

I first devoured this a few months ago, but I keep returning to it. I feel like there’s a weird giddiness in the air accompanying the promise of vaccination, not to mention drama after drama as the pandemic drags on and there is something calming about returning to the levelheadedness in here, even as she is withering or despairing. This isn’t light, fun reading. More like she did the heavy lifting to invite readers to share her pandemic thoughts, without being overwhelmed by their heaviness.

Elsewhere she describes the art of writing as being about ‘control’, despite being advertised as ‘creative.’ Maybe that’s the appeal of this book, but also the appeal of her in general (for me). In this awful, boring time of constantly feeling out of control, her anxiety is so present and her anger so vivid in these essays that somehow their provocations and observations feel like echoes of familiar feelings, calmly crystallised by her super steady sentences.

The most coherent thing I have to say is that this is the sexiest and scariest thing I’ve ever read. Somehow it felt alive like tendrils might grow from the pages and bind themselves to my hands.

It is narrated by Jo, a foreign student in a strange place for university, who moves into a house with no walls with a woman with no boundaries. Their home starts to *come alive* fermenting in odd, fervent ways. It’s so deliciously surreal that often I felt like I was drunk-reading even when stone cold sober. Maybe it made me drunk. The language is liquid, oozing slimy psychosexual magical realism. The story itself is like a terrarium for lust and decay, and both are equally lush.

This is Hval’s debut novel but she’s actually a musician. I don’t know if I’m brave enough to listen to her music, still reeling from her writing.

I read a lot of good books last year but my best 2020 reading experiences were without a doubt getting LOST in fantasy. The escapist joy isn’t just about new worlds but also a departure from highbrow content or highfalutin language, just fast fun. In the height of lockdown, my brother put me on to David Gemmel’s Rigante series and Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, both chockablock with deliciously cheesy clichés (like a hero with golden red hair) and both provided much-needed escapist delight.

The Broken Earth series is nothing like that, a game changer in the truest sense. Yes fast fun, but also extremely intelligent, progressive and beautifully written. The books are set on a massive continent called the Stillness, in a far-future Earth wracked with periodic disasters known as Seasons, apocalyptic events that reshape the world and its inhabitants. Talk about relevant.

The easy blend of sci-fi and fantasy somehow makes the idea of deep time and climate chaos a lot more accessible, but the best thing about these books is how emotionally vivid they are. Family drama is as spectacular as earthquakes, feelings are as wild as superpowers, building civilizations just as hard as building relationships. The characters are so rich and so real, it makes perfect sense that N.K. Jemisin is the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years or for all three novels in a trilogy.

Look I read this about a month ago. Still trying to catch my breath. Someone should make this compulsory reading for coloured, black and Indian South Africans, especially the woke ones who don’t want to or don’t know how to talk about the social engineering that we glibly dismiss as colorism. It’s so much more than that.

Like, someone on Twitter was talking about people in Joburg are so slick about judging your whole life via a seemingly innocuous question about where you went to school. We also do that thing of asking where someone is from to (spatially) suss out their whole life story.

Now imagine a fictional town in Jim Crow society so invested in light skin that they strive toward genetically engineering their population to get lighter with every generation (uh, every SA town in history). Then imagine identical twins from that town, who have diametrically opposed experiences in and outside of that weird ass liminal racial space.

Please understand that twins really boggle my brain. I am equal parts in awe and afraid of their magical realism. This book is no fantasy but having the town and the twins as a premise felt like a double helix that really showed how colorism isn’t just interpersonal (a grandmother who wants to keep you out of the sun) or systemic (pretty fair girls landing pearly jobs much easier). It’s entangled in such intimate ways, like how we think about our bodies and who we choose to marry and why.

It was also interesting to see white characters be pretty clueless in their ignorance of the nuance of all this race shit (especially now that I am in the heart of European darkness). It’s a relieving reminder in the midst of all this BLM allyship that there are things that are nearly impossible to understand unless you physically experience them. Thinking about performing whiteness (intentionally, through passing and unconsciously, through privilege) through this book is also a great opportunity to think about performances of blackness, wokeness. 

Anyway, I could go on and on. The story is wild, the characters are full and the more existential questions about aspirational performing are really brave. It’s brilliant.

Death in Her Hands
Ottessa Moshfegh

"It was good to have a few secrets here and there. It kept one interested in herself."

Yikes this was a weird one. I finished it a few weeks ago, but the experience has been rattling around in my chest, refusing to relax. 

The story follows Vesta Gul, a 72-year-old widow who moves to a secluded cabin in the woods with her dog. On one of their morning walks, she stumbles upon a cryptic handwritten note and so unfolds a slow-build meta-mystery. As Vesta plays detective, piecing together scraps of stories, the reader does too, piecing together Vesta.

I’ve seen Moshfegh’s style described as a kick in the crotch, but there’s no pleasure in that metaphor. The best thing about her writing is how funny it is, despite (because of?) the pain of the kick. Keeping company with her protagonists is what’s weird, and fun. They’re always female, mordant, hyper-alienated.

Moshfegh describes this one as “a loneliness story” but it’s more like a deep dive into what happens without human contact, the ways in which an ornate inner-life can take shape and flourish dangerously, subsuming reality. But there’s so much romance to the idea of an sprightly old woman taking control of herself and her life by opting out of (disempowering) community! 

Moshfegh’s magic is keeping us intrigued in the claustrophobia of Vesta’s mind, rooting for her as she reclaims her past by staring solitude in the eye without looking away, even when it’s scary.

Breasts and Eggs
Mieko Kawakami

“If you want a kid, there’s no need to get wrapped up in a man’s desire. There’s no need to involve women’s desire either.”

I’ve been banging on about this book to anyone and everyone for weeks. The first part is about a fractured family of three women, the second part about a novelist in her late 30s, debating with herself and everyone around her about whether to have a baby alone. At the core, it’s a book about the value of life: different takes on what makes a good life, what bringing life into this (often awful) world means, who gets to do it and how.

It’s set in Japan and addresses a lot of social pressures that resonate in South Africa too, like misogynistic expectations of who would make a good parent and why and perceptions of what’s selfish and what isn’t.

The stream of consciousness literary style is so great, super evocative, like changing channels between thoughts and feelings instead of a linear plot. Very Murakami. Incidentally, Kawakami is well-known for her literary relationship with Murakami (jealous down!) and has published a book of interviews with him where she confronts him about the sexist portrayals of women in his work.

This novel has none of the baggage I’ve come to associate with Japanese literature (my fault for only reading middle-aged men). It’s like an astonishing spritz of social commentary, driven by solo working class characters that are so normal, no strong/sexy women nonsense. Grimy apartments, breast enhancements, menstrual pads and misery, artificial insemination, and so so much hope.

The Death of Vivek Oji
Akwaeke Emezi

“Mariah’s voice was wrapping high notes above us and it felt like heartbreak washing in a thousand pinpricks over our skin.”

I gulped this overnight and was so winded at the end, I was lowkey grateful that loadshedding forced me to sit quietly in the dark for a few hours, trying to decompress. Then @nomalifromsoweto came to the rescue and told me how she listened to Mariah Carey afterwards so I copied her and it helped bring me back to my own life. She also described the novel perfectly: “it’s so immense. It does my favourite thing well: the smallness of one life/world but man is it big and everlasting.” That description reminded me of ‘A Little Life’, which was probably the last time I felt this punched in the gut by a story/style combo.

If Freshwater blew you away, this will too but very differently. If that book was about the multitudes inside an individual, maybe this one is about how one person can mean many different things to many different people. It’s full of characters, all in one place; full of relationship dynamics, all coalesce around Vivek Oji; full of varieties, brands, styles of love, all given the same careful attention and shown to be as vast and important as the person doing the loving.

Girl, Other, Woman
Bernadine Evaristo

Tbh I started reading this novel a bit skeptically cos I’ve been feeling mildly fatigued by #queenqueenqueen type approaches to #blackwomenmatter discourse. I also felt super guilty for feeling like that, so sinking as if hypnotized into this novel about black British women was such a relief. Maybe I’m just tired of America, the many ways in which black America dominates racial content.

There are 12 characters, chapters, life-worlds. They overlap, sometimes gradually and sometimes as an electric shock. The pace is addictive (I read it over three nights), the characters are complex (the only common thread being born black and female) and while some are close, others just happen to go to the theatre on the same night. The style is free-flowing and fragmented, Evaristo calls it “fusion fiction” and its so tightly designed, it never sprawls.

Just like the busyness of the characters, the themes are just as busy. I loooove that this is not a book about besting patriarchy (I mean it is, but not just), it’s a book about class, sex, Britain, family, friendship, immigrant pressures, individual pleasures.

Evaristo is the first black woman to win the Booker Prize for Fiction for this novel. She was also one of two winners this year: for the first time ever the award was jointly given to two authors 😏 Most critics think Evaristo's novel should have won. And look, I haven’t read the other book (The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to A Handmaid's Tale) but I love Atwood. That said, after reading this, I think Evaristo deserves every single prize on the planet.

The Eternal Audience of One
Rémy Ngamije

I wasn’t really aware that “millennial fiction” was an actual genre until I sunk my teeth into this treat. Think angsty, self-deprecating, coming-of-age tragic comedy.

The protagonist, Séraphin (such a good name!) is Rwandan-born, Namibian-raised (like the author), a postgrad student grappling with romantic drama and racist Cape Town drama, all while weighed down by immigrant-parent-expectation existential drama. The politics of it all is serious without being heavy cos the prose is so fun. The supporting characters and love interests are also great, a nerdy cool brat-pack. It’s like a compendium of multiracial migrant pop culture and current affairs.

Its a relief to read a book about African migrant experiences in SA that’s urbane, critical, relatable and hopeful. There were parts that felt too wordy and I was tempted to skim past but also parts that I really savored for being deliciously sharp observations.

Also delicious: publisher Blackbird Books 🖤

The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead

 bought this on the day that bookshops reopened cos I’m a hype-beast eager-beaver and Colson Whitehead had just been awarded the Pulitzer for fiction. He is only the 4th writer to win it twice, and the 1st author of color to do so. I like things clearly and this novel is THINGS.

It’s about abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Floria. Usually I shy I away from obviously heavy material like that but he has such a light hand, it’s a marvel. The best writing is usually the simplest and this is both sparse and incandescent, shining a gentle light into a very dark story. 

Early on in the novel, he describes someone as “a white man” but doesn’t do same with black characters, he describes them as if it should be taken as a given that they are black. This is very rare, a small, good thing that I don’t take for granted because this is the kind of revolution-in-praxis writing style that makes or breaks a reading experience, for black children especially. 

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong

“To bake a cake in the eye of the storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger.”

A dream, wrapped in a poem, inside a novel.

We Need New Names
NoViolet Bulawayo

This lockdown is starting to rankle and this book did nothing for my nerves. But as I baked and painted my nails trying to distract and deaden my panic, it felt good to be read this angrily on some, “let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair” Mariame Kaba energy. .

A coming-of-age novel but with teen angst and confusion amplified by loss of home, it’s set between a soul-shattering shack settlement called Paradise somewhere in Zimbabwe and Detroit (or, as Darling the narrator and her friends call it, "Destroyedmichygen”.) The guava-stealing gang are a window into Zimbabwe until Darling journeys to a “better” life in America and man oh man there’s nothing like reading a country’s trauma through young eyes. .

The real delight is Bulawayo’s linguistic prowess, it’s so thrilling when sharp sharp social commentary is written simply. She’s the kind of writer that makes you laugh while breaking your heart, and you thank her for it.

Hunter of Stories
Eduardo Galeano

Published posthumously, this is the final flourish from the Uruguayan maestro. Originally a journalist, his style is a blend of radical politics, mythology, travelogue and testimony and he’s renown as a literary giant of the Latin American left for popularizing economic theory, mastering vignettes and writing prolifically about soccer. .

I’d actually started reading his classic Open Veins of Latin America first cos my girl Arundhati loves it (also Hugo Chávez famously gifted it to Obama, nuffsaid) but it’s pretty dense and nonfiction isn’t my forte so I struggled to settle into it. Luckily, this is the perfect read for a time like this, when concentration feels as precious as sanitizer. .

The anecdotes and reflections (most one page long) are all so rich but written so lightly, it’s easy to whizz through and somehow still find yourself ruminating on them hours later.

Grand Union
Zadie Smith

I started this foolishly planning to ration stories like quarantine snacks. I read 3 decently then inhaled the remaining 16. By the last, my chest was tight and aching. A symptom of Zadie, not Covid19. She’s so smart and funny and her characters are so full and her observations so sharp that it usually hurts, like how can someone be so good? In a novel, that kinda effervescence can be heartbreaking and I usually have to take breaks to not feel overwhelmed but short stories are my #1 snacks so I felt free to binge. .

I’m so glad I did, somehow her fiction feels less frenetic, more delicious in short form. Also, this collection is a buffet of old favs and new experiments. Some forays into sci-fi, some historical fiction. It also feels like the least British of her books, full of Americanisms and locations beyond the UK/US, so her many multicultural references feel neatly at home. Some of the new stories feel comfortable and familiar (like her essays) and some vivid and piercing (like her fiction) but many feel experimental, not exactly easy to enjoy, more like impressive for just existing. Like her I guess 🤷🏽‍♀️

Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Marlon James

Only in a time this bizarre could I have so fully immersed myself in this novel and all I can say is black sci fi will save us. Or me at least. I started this freaking out alone in Basel, through the stress of Zurich/ Dubai/ OR Tambo airports and it got me through the weird first days of Joburg-under-quarantine. So it’s obv a beast of a book. Imagine the joy of black pageantry overlaid with pervasive dread and vicious violence. It probably shouldn’t be read in a hurry (it’s a labyrinth) but you also can’t dwell in it (too inhospitable). It’s strange but also sexy in a way that’s only possible when upending genre. .

I struggled to get into A Brief History of Seven Killings but this is one of those books where real/surreal boundaries are blurred (my fav) and even though his semantic mayhem is difficult; it was easy to get hooked by his menagerie of witches, eunuchs, demons, vampires, slavers and shapeshifters. Also, the main character has this super nose that sniffs out enemies and lovers and I swear my sense of smell is better after finishing this book. That alone is reason enough to sink your teeth into the first in the trilogy of what James flippantly called the “African Game of Thrones.”

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

I started reading this as the sun was setting on a deserted mountain gorge in Magaliesburg (baboons were barking nearby 😩) and finished it at dawn in deserted Basel (Coronavirus has arrived 😑). I love when my real-life mirrors my reading-life: this novel is about isolation, loneliness and being alone. .

It sounds sad (it is) but it’s also really funny and extremely impressive (she published it at 23). The story follows a lonesome deaf-mute in 1930s Deep South and the disparate characters drawn to him. It’s jam packed with drunken socialism, the frustrated dignity of demanding black rights and generally endearing searches for love. This is my second McCullers read, officially a fan 😍

Xala
Sembene Ousmane

“However long it stays in the river, the tree-trunk will never turn into a crocodile.” .

I read this baby in one fell swoop. Literally, spent Saturday in bed gobbling it up without coming up for air, my fav way to read. I haven’t watched the film cos I’m still swooning over the book, a comic masterpiece about a prominent businessman cursed with impotence after wedding his third wife. It’s sublime and ridiculous and easily one of the neatest novels I’ve ever read.

“Black and brown death is the precondition of every Anthropocene origin story.” 

My first read of 2020 was this cutie-pie, a short but intense critique of White geology via a delicious chorus of Black feminist thinkers. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene (the proposed geologic time period during which human activities have altered the natural cycles of earth systems) she writes about how no geology is neutral, a super important meditation on the politics/poetics of geology and race.