Archives de catégorie : London 2022 Fiction

NO ONE DIES YET de Kobby Ben Ben

An unsettling tale of murder in a country whose dead slaves are shackled with stories that must be heard.

NO ONE DIES YET
by Kobby Ben Ben
‎ Europa Editions UK, Fall 2022
(via Neon Literary)

The Year of Return, linked to the 400th anniversary of slaves landing in the US, memorialised the many who died during the slave trade in Ghana, particularly at Elmina Castle, while encouraging members of the African diaspora to visit. As Black diasporans around the world make the pilgrimage to West Africa, three African-American friends join in the festivities to explore Ghana’s colonial past and its underground queer scene. They are thrust into the hands of two guides, Kobby and Nana, whose intentions aren’t clear, yet they are the narrators we have to trust. Kobby, a modern deviant according to Nana’s traditional and religious principles, offers a more upscale and privileged tour of Ghana and also becomes the friends’ link to Accra’s secret gay culture. Nana’s adherence to his pastor’s teachings against sin makes him hate Kobby enough to want to kill.
NO ONE DIES YET is a shocking and unsettling tale of murder that is at times funny, at times erotic, yet always outspoken and iconoclastic. Kobby Ben Ben proves in this his first novel that he is set to become one of the most prominent new voices to emerge in this decade.

Kobby Ben Ben, born in Ghana, spends his time reviewing books as well as curating books for his African Book Club, Ghana Must Read. His eccentric Instagram book blog, @bookworm_man, has caught the attention of Booker Winner Bernardine Evaristo and other celebrated writers such as Maaza Mengiste and Petina Gappah. When he isn’t writing poetry masked as prose or anticipating Michaela Coel’s next project, he’s most passionate about discovering debut writers of colour whose stories shed light on underrepresented languages and cultures. NO ONE DIES YET is his first novel.

OTHER HOUSES de Paddy O’Reilly

A masterful and tender story about people who live at the fringes of society, from payday to payday. Acutely observed and lyrical, Paddy O Reilly’s novel paints a haunting picture of class, aspiration and the boundaries we will cross for love.

OTHER HOUSES
by Paddy O’Reilly
Affirm Press Australia, March 2022
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

All those memories. A man on his knees. The dark burn of Coke washing down a yellow wall. The night someone strung dead bats along the school fence, their black leather wings shredded into streamers. I never want to revisit that life.
Lily works as a cleaner. Each day she moves through the houses of wealthy Melbournians, unseen, scrubbing away the detritus of other people’s privilege. Her partner Janks, a reformed drug addict, churns vats of cheesy dip in a factory. With every measly pay check they inch further and further away from their former lives of poverty and addiction. Both Janks and Lily are determined that their daughter Jewelee won’t end up like them. She’ll have a career, not a deadend job. She’ll have savings, not debt. She’ll be able to afford a cleaner, not be the cleaner. Her future will be bright. But, like Sisyphus, one wrong move in their upward battle will see them back at square one, fighting to just get by.

Paddy O’Reilly is an Australian author. She wrote the novels The Factory, The Fine Colour of Rust and The Wonders, two collections of award-winning short stories, and a novella. Her novels have been shortlisted for major awards, and her stories have been widely published, anthologised and broadcast in Australia and overseas.

THE WILDERWOMEN de Ruth Emmie Lang

Two sisters embark on an extraordinary journey to discover the truth behind their mother’s mysterious disappearance. Ohioana Book Award finalist Ruth Emmie Lang returns with a new cast of ordinary characters with extraordinary abilities

THE WILDERWOMEN
by Ruth Emmie Lang
St. Martin’s Press, November 2022
(via Harvey Klinger)

Five years ago, Nora Wilder disappeared. The oldest of her two daughters, Zadie, should have seen it coming, because she can literally see things coming. But not even her psychic abilities were able to prevent their mother from vanishing one morning, never to return.
Zadie’s estranged younger sister, Finn, can’t see into the future, but she has an uncannily good memory, so good that she remembers not only her own memories, but the echoes of memories other people have left behind. On the afternoon of her graduation party, Finn is seized by an “echo” more powerful than anything she’s experienced before: a woman singing a song she recognizes, a song about a bird…
When Finn wakes up alone in the woods with no idea of how she got there, she realizes who the memory belongs to. Nora. Now, it’s up to Finn to convince her sister not only that their mom is still out there, but that she wants to be found. Against Zadie’s better judgement, her and Finn hit the highway, using Finn’s echoes to retrace Nora’s footsteps and uncover the answer to the question that has been haunting them for years: Why did she leave?
But it isn’t long before Zadie realizes there is a dark side to her sister’s gift. The more time Finn spends in their mother’s past, the harder it is for her to return to the present, to return to herself. As Zadie feels her sister start to slip away, she will have to decide what lengths she is willing to go to to find their mother, knowing that if she chooses wrong, she could lose them both for good.

« Exquisitely drawn characters imbue Lang’s unconventional plot with verisimilitude and heart, inspiring readers to ponder whether the world is stranger and more beautiful than it appears. Effervescent, ethereal, and suffused with wonder. » — Kirkus (starred review)

« Lang’s melancholy, atmospheric writing sets the perfect tone as the Wilder sisters unravel the mystery. The result is a cozy supernatural outing perfect for an autumn night. » —Publisher’s Weekly

Ruth Emmie Lang was born in Glasgow, Scotland and has the red hair to prove it. When she was four years old, she immigrated to Ohio where she has lived ever since. She has since lost her Scottish accent, but still has the hair. Ruth currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her husband and dreams of someday owning a little house in the woods where she can write more books. Her first novel, Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance, was a finalist for the 2017 Book of the Year Award from Book of the Month Club and was a Target Book Club Pick in 2018.

THE APPLICANT de Nazlı Koca

Direct, darkly funny, and profound, Nazlı Koca’s debut novel THE APPLICANT explores what it means to be an immigrant, woman, and emerging writer.

THE APPLICANT
by Nazlı Koca
Grove Press, February2023

It’s 2017 and Leyla, a leftwing Turkish twenty-something living in Berlin, is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel in order to stay afloat while awaiting a verdict on her visa status. Having failed her master’s thesis and sued the German university over its decision, she is on the verge of losing her student visa and being forced to return to Istanbul, a city she thought she’d left behind for good.
As the clock winds down on her temporary visa, Leyla meets a right-wing Swedish tourist at a bar one night and—against her political convictions and better judgment—begins to fall in love. Will she choose to live a cookie-cutter life as the wife of a Volvo salesman, or just as unimaginable, return to Turkey to her mother and sister, codependent and enmeshed, the ghost of her father still haunting their lives?
Written in the wry, propulsive diary-form of Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin and with the probing selfreflection of Sheila Heti’s novels, Nazli Koca radically and courageously examines one’s place in a deeply uncertain world, examining the bounds of state violence and self-destruction, of social dissociation and intense familial love. A highly original narrative, THE APPLICANT is a stunning dissection of a liminal life lived between borders and identities.

Nazlı Koca is a writer and poet from the Mediterranean coast of Turkey who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame and lives in New York City. She is the recipient of grants from the Nanovic Institute, Soham Dance Space, and United States Artists. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, BookForum, Second Factory, The Chicago Review of Books, books without covers, among other outlets. THE APPLICANT is her first novel.

RIVER SPIRIT de Leila Aboulela

A masterful, adventurous new novel set in nineteenth-century Sudan from Caine Prizewinning, New York Times Notable author Leila Aboulela.

RIVER SPIRIT
by Leila Aboulela
Atlantic Monthly Press, March 2023

Hailed as “a versatile prose stylist” (New York Times) whose work “shows the rich possibilities of living in the West with different, non-Western, ways of knowing and thinking” (Sunday Herald), Leila Aboulela has been longlisted for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction) multiple times and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. She has been praised by J.M. Coetzee, Ali Smith, Aminatta Forna, and Anthony Marra, among others, for her rich and nuanced novels depicting Islamic spiritual and political life.
Her new novel, RIVER SPIRIT, is a compulsive and searching look at the complex relationship between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam, colonizer and colonized. A spellbinding and addictive narrative of the years leading up to the brutal British conquest of Sudan in 1898, it colorfully narrates a story of the individuals who fought for and against Gordon of Khartoum—the British general who defended the city against the Sudanese during the 1884 siege of Khartoum—and the self-anointed Mahdi, Sufi religious leader of Sudan. Told mesmerizingly in a chorus of the vivid women and men who fought for and against these two leaders—including an orphaned young enslaved woman, her unlikely suitor and guardian, a military rebel, and two ferocious mothers—this page-turning novel delivers up a complex portrait of the “tragic Victorian hero” who ultimately proved a disappointment to the Sudanese who trusted him, and an obstacle to the thousands of men and women who—against the odds and for a brief time—gained independence from all foreign rule through their will-power, subterfuge, and sacrifice.
A fascinating immersion into Sudanese history written by one of its own, Aboulela’s latest novel examines the trials of war and the dynamism of human courage through the voices of society’s most unexpected heroes.

Leila Aboulela is the first ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her novels include The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator (longlisted for the Orange Prize), Minaret, and Lyrics Alley, which was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and now lives in Aberdeen, Scotland.