Samira Sedira: The makings of a murder
French-Algerian author and actress Samira Sedira’s People Like Them, her first novel to be translated into English, is a fictional retelling of a real-life multiple murder in a mountain village in Haute-Savoie, in which a recently arrived wealthy black property developer, his white wife and their three young children were brutally killed by a neighbour....
Chibundu Onuzo: Ancestry and identity
Chibundu Onuzo’s latest novel Sankofa is an entertaining and eye-opening story of a woman in search of her roots. Anna Bain is a mixed-race woman of 48 who grew up in London with her Welsh mother Bronwen, knowing little about her African father who in turn has no idea of her existence. After her mother...
Brenda Navarro: Beyond motherhood
Brenda Navarro’s evocative and powerful novel Empty Houses explores the pain of losing a child, the social impositions of motherhood, and the plight of Mexico’s disappeared and economically disadvantaged. It opens with the voice of a distraught mother whose autistic three-year-old boy Daniel is snatched away from her in a Mexico City park as she...
Starting over
Kololo Hill by Neema Shah (Picador, 18 February) starts with Idi Amin’s declaration that all Asians must leave Uganda within 90 days. What follows is one family’s fear, sadness and the uprooting of their whole life. Jaya and Motiband moved to Uganda from India and have built up a successful life and business along with...
Neema Shah: A place called home
If you’re non-white living in a majority white place or indeed a visible or identifiable ‘foreigner’ in a land, the chances are you will have at some point been told to “go back to your own country”. Especially in 1970s Britain. The people who regularly shouted this none-too-friendly command would most probably not stop and...
William Boyd: Melting in the dark
In swinging Britain in the summer of 1968, three characters are leading troubled lives. Sexually conflicted producer Talbot Kydd is overseeing an archly arthouse movie in Brighton while sneaking away from his wife to a secret London flat and pondering a possible future with a scaffolder named Gary; his star, American actress Anny Viklund, is...
Jini Reddy: Believing is seeing
There’s synchronicity at play as I emerge from lockdown and read Jini Reddy’s timely and entertaining Wainwright Prize-shortlisted travel guide Wanderland. Though, to be fair, travel guide is too simplistic a description. It’s autobiography, spliced with a search for self, and a series of escapades in places of spiritual interest from Snowdonia, to Glastonbury to...
Avni Doshi: Mother and daughter
Avni Doshi’s debut novel Burnt Sugar – longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize immediately prior to UK publication and subsequently making the shortlist – is a compelling exploration of the ties that bind a mother and her daughter, and of an irreconcilable longing for self-expression in both of them that signifies betrayal. As a young woman,...
Anbara Salam: Desire and betrayal
Anbara Salam’s second novel Belladonna is a mesmerising story of friendship, obsession, secrets and identity. In conservative Connecticut in the summer of 1956, 15-year-old Bridget Ryan delights in her friendship with cool, enigmatic, beautiful and brazen Isabella Crowley. The following summer, they both get the chance to spend a year in Italy studying at a...
Inside and out
Clarence knew man lived in the shadows and that he’d lived in them for so long he didn’t even realise he lived in them. That, more to the point, man was shadow. Had become it. Had evolved to be it. That’s how disconnected man had become in our hero’s eyes. Man had castrated himself long...
Dorian Gray is having more fun than you
You don’t know how you know Dorian Gray. When Dorian Gray first added you on Facebook, you two had sixteen mutual friends. You had been in New York six weeks, and you were always drunk. You figured you’d met Dorian Gray at one of your parties – your riotous parties, your all-night parties, your starlit...
Chinese Almanac
My father lives by the Chinese Almanac (通勝) – it tells fortunes. Like when might be a good day to marry your lover or move house or landscape a garden. Me, I have no truck with that kind of hocus-pocus. Keep it simple. Two rules: you don’t turn down food; you stay the fuck out...
