Archives par étiquette : Grove Atlantic

AND THEN HE SANG A LULLABY d’Ani Kayode Somtochukwu

A searingly honest and resonant debut from a Nigerian writer and queer liberation activist, exploring what love and freedom cost in a society steeped in homophobia.

AND THEN HE SANG A LULLABY
by Ani Kayode Somtochukwu
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, June 2023

 

August is a God-fearing track star who leaves Enugu City to attend university and escape his overbearing sisters. He carries the weight of their lofty expectations, the shame of facing himself, and the haunting memory of a mother he never knew. It’s his first semester and pressures aside, August is making friends, doing well in his classes. He even almost has a girlfriend. There’s only one problem: he can’t stop thinking about Segun, an openly gay student who works at a local cybercafé. Segun carries his own burdens and has been wounded in too many ways. When he meets August, their connection is undeniable, but Segun is reluctant to open himself up to August. He wants to love and be loved by a man who is comfortable in his own skin, who will see and hold and love Segun, exactly as he is.
Despite their differences, August and Segun forge a tender intimacy that defies the violence around them. But there is only so long Segun can stand being loved behind closed doors, while August lives a life beyond the world they’ve created together. And when a new, sweeping anti-gay law is passed, August and Segun must find a way for their love to survive in a Nigeria that was always determined to eradicate them. A tale of rare bravery and profound beauty, AND THEN HE SANG A LULLABY is an extraordinary debut that marks Ani as a voice to watch.

Ani Kayode Somtochukwu is an award-winning Nigerian writer and queer liberation activist. His work interrogates themes of queer identity, resistance, and liberation. His writings have appeared in literary magazines across Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America.

 

CITY OF LAUGHTER de Temim Fruchter

A rich and riveting work that marries centuries-old folklore to 21st-century queer literary fiction, CITY OF LAUGHTER spans four generations of Jewish women who are bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years

CITY OF LAUGHTER
by Temim Fruchter
Grove Press, Spring 2023

The exciting debut of a Rona Jaffe Award winner, CITY OF LAUGHTER is a book for the reader of Orlando, Jeanette Winterson, Andrea Lawlor, and the dog-eared Bashevis Singer paperback she still returns to after her first gay kiss. It tangles beautifully with Jewish spirituality and generational silence, with a history of displacement and a present life half-lived for fear of invoking ancestral judgment—and young queer people have a way of upsetting the familial applecart…
Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter, and as this story opens an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make the bride and groom laugh on their wedding day, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger—bringing the laughter that the people of Ropshitz desperately need.
In the present day, Shiva Margolin, a young woman named for a mourning rite, is a graduate student in Jewish folklore getting over the heartbreak of her first big queer love amid mourning the death of her beloved father. She struggles to connect with her mother, who harbors secrets and barriers that Shiva can’t break. When the opportunity arises for her to visit Poland on a half-formed research trip, she takes it; she’s interested in her mysterious matriarchal line, in particular Mira Wollman, the great-grandmother about whom no one speaks, and who left a piece of herself behind in Poland when she emigrated. But as in most folklore, the answers to Shiva’s questions won’t come so easily. Zigzagging between our known universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, CITY OF LAUGHTER is epic and sharply intimate, both fantastical and hyperreal.

Temim Fruchter was raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish household, and her faith in communal experience and the spirit world remains central to her identity; this novel was inspired by her own great-grandmother, who was born in Ropshitz. Temim holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and was previously a founding member and drummer for The Shondes, a feminist punk band. She has received fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, first prize in short fiction from both American Literary Review and New South, the 2020 Jane Hoppen Residency, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She lives in Brooklyn.

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.

WELCOME TO THE GAME de Craig Henderson

From a brilliant new voice, WELCOME TO THE GAME is a gripping thriller that races through Motor City at heart-stopping pace as its protagonists swerve to avoid danger at every turn. Writer and BBC presenter Craig Henderson screeches onto the scene with this fast-paced debut, for fans of Drive by James Sallis, Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby, and Thomas Perry’s Butcher Boy series.

WELCOME TO THE GAME
by Craig Henderson
Atlantic Monthly Press, August 2022

Ex-rally driver Spencer Burnham moved his family from England to Detroit and opened a foreign car dealership, but his life was derailed by the death of his beloved wife. Disconnected from his young daughter and losing control of the cocktail of drugs and alcohol that gets him through the day, he only just keeps Child Protective Services at bay while his business teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.
Then he has a seemingly chance encounter with charismatic but lethal gangster, Dominic McGrath. McGrath employs military strategy in the art of crime, covertly and mercilessly promoting inter-gang rivalry to keep his competitors so busy that they can’t launder their own money. For a hefty percentage, McGrath takes care of this tedious business for them. But McGrath is feeling the squeeze from informants, the rise of tech surveillance, booming gangs from out of state encroaching on their old school Detroit outfit, and a hotshot detective who’s made busting McGrath a personal crusade. For some time he’s been planning a last heist that would allow a comfortable retirement, provided he can find a very special type of driver—one who’s capable, trustworthy . . . and naïve.
To Spencer, McGrath seems heaven-sent. He even pays cash, lots of it. But it comes at a price; Spencer finds himself playing in an arena where rookies don’t last long. Wising up to the ruthlessness behind McGrath’s charming façade, he tries to break free, but McGrath has too much invested to allow him to leave.
As the city swelters in a heat wave, the two men apply their considerable talents to besting each other, while mistakenly assuming they have only each other to beat.

Craig Henderson is a British writer and the presenter of the BBC’s “Books That Made Britain” series. Scottish by birth, he gained an MA in Latin and Ancient History from the University of Edinburgh where he also won two scholarships. WELCOME TO THE GAME is his 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.