From the author of Book of the Little Axe, nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, comes a riveting literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller that explores the abuses of history and the costs of revenge.
CASUALTIES OF TRUTH
by Lauren Francis-Sharma
Atlantic Monthly Press, February 2025
Lauren Francis-Sharma’s two previous novels have established her as a deft chronicler of history and its intersections with flawed humans struggling toward justice. Her latest is a gripping novel set between Washington, DC and Johannesburg, South Africa that asks if we are ever truly able to escape our past and how to right an unquestionable wrong.
Prudence Wright seems to have it all: a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, DC; and the past glories of a successful career at McKinsey, which now enables her to stay home and dedicate her days to her autistic son. When she and Davis head out for dinner with one of Davis’s new colleagues on a stormy summer evening, Prudence has little reason to think that certain details of her past might arise sometime between cocktails and the appetizer course. Yet when Davis’s new colleague turns out to be an old acquaintance, Matshediso, Prudence recalls the traumatic events of her childhood growing up in Baltimore and the formative time she spent in South Africa in 1996. There, she attended the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, which uncovered the many horrors and human rights abuses of the Apartheid state. These hearings fundamentally shaped her sense of righteousness and justice, and when Mat reveals the real reason for his reappearance, Prudence’s values will be put to a more difficult test than she has ever faced before.
Lauren Francis-Sharma, a child of Trinidadian immigrants has written about the Caribbean in both her novels. “‘Til the Well Runs Dry” loosely recounts the story of her grandmother’s mid-20th century journey to the United States, with feature articles in both the Washington Post in July 2014 and The Baltimore Sun in March 2015. Her latest, “Book of the Little Axe,” takes place in the late 18th century to the early 19th century, from the changing colonial rule on the island of Trinidad to the rugged terrain of Bighorn Mountain in western North America.
Joni Ackerman’s decision to raise children came with a steep cost. Twenty-five years ago, she was a pioneering filmmaker, one of the few women to break into the all-male club of Hollywood feature film directors. But she and her husband Paul had always wanted a family, and his ascending career at a premier television network provided a safety net. They have recently transplanted to Brooklyn, so that Paul can launch a major East Coast production studio, when a scandal rocks the film industry and forces Joni to revisit a secret from long ago involving a powerful man who abused women, including the friend of her youth, Val.
Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language, dubbed “the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation” (Guardian). His work has been shortlisted for awards including the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award for Novel of the Year, and selected for best of the year lists, including those of the Times, Guardian, Independent and Financial Times. He also earns rapturous reviews, with his last novel, Phone, hailed as “one of the most significant literary works of our century” (New Statesman). Following a blistering personal account of addiction in his memoir Will, Self turns his forensic eye to the life of his own equally troubled mother, Elaine, in this brilliantly conceived new novel.