Priya Hein’s poetic, visceral novel addresses the devastating legacies of slavery, racial injustice and economic disparity in Mauritius, layering the stories of fifteen year old Noemi and those of her enslaved ancestors to lay bare the brutal realities of colonialism, writes Laetitia Erskine.
Naomi Booth’s short story collection delves into the nocturnal happenings of both animals and humans, revealing worlds that are closely intertwined in all the beauty, ugliness, and honesty of nature.
Nana Nkweti cleaves open worlds shaped by Cameroonian heritage and American individuality, deftly revealing complex cultural exchanges in these immersive, genre-bending short stories.
A sizzling novel to read in the heat, when you’re hungry for life, Jessica Andrews’ Milk Teeth explores what it means for women to take up space unapologetically and allow their needs – and desires – to be met.
In her captivating novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield tenderly and credibly depicts the pain of absence, loss and transformation often experienced in romantic relationships.
Rym Kechacha reviews The Books of Jacob: a wonderful, huge and complex book that asks the reader to “turn our gaze away from the simple”, and instead embrace flux, transformation, and narrative that “sprawls like a great tree’s roots”.
Elodie Barnes talks to Emily Cooper about her debut collection Glass: poems which shift and reflect on the ideas of home as architectural space, home as memory space, permanence, impermanence, and the ‘ownership’ of stories.
This exhilarating anthology of short stories challenges us to look beyond the shiny façade of ‘the new’ and to embrace ‘the abject’ – the ambiguous, the old, the distressing parts of ourselves and our society – and to ask what place the abject should have in our culture today.
Shamini Sriskandarajah reviews this debut collection of London-based short stories, full of vivid, colourful characters and with a joyfully feminist streak.