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...
from Lumen
How might poetry help us articulate the body in illness, in work, and in love? Tiffany Atkinson’s fourth collection includes the sequence ‘Dolorimeter’, which won the 2014 Medicine Unboxed Prize. Taking fragments of speech and found text from a hospital residency at Bronglais Hospital in Aberystwyth to pay homage to the inventiveness and humour of...
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...
Black Britain: Writing Back
Penguin has pulled together a stunning new list of books by writers who have written about black Britain and the diaspora over the last hundred years. The six launch titles, each with a new introduction by Bernadine Evaristo, range from fast-paced thrillers to historical fiction, and showcase a diverse pool of black writing talent. The...
t + 0: 1944
The light is grey and sullen; a smoulder, a flare choking on the soot of its own burning, and leaking only a little of its power into the visible spectrum. The rest is heat and motion. But for now the burn-line still creeps inside the warhead’s casing. It is a thread-wide front of change propagating...
Lucy Jago: Making a stink
Lucy Jago’s A Net for Small Fishes is a captivating story of female friendship and solidarity amid a scandal that rocked the court of James I. It is narrated by 30-something Anne Turner, a doctor’s wife and mother of six with a talent for fashion and a patent for saffron dye, which she uses to...
All the love in the world
“It is nice when two people come together in the universe,” Huma Qureshi remembers telling her young son in the opening pages of How We Met. He promptly asks how she and his dad Richard came to be together, and so begins Huma’s story of her quest for married love. It’s a short book –...
The lives of others
I was expecting more from Sea State by Tabitha Lasley (Fourth Estate, 4 February). I wanted to get a real insight into the lives of an offshore platform in the North Sea, but instead this book was more about the messy life of a 30-something writer who was running away from herself and trying to...
Ellery Lloyd: Cracks in the mirror
People Like Her, by husband-and-wife team Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos writing as Ellery Lloyd, is a razor-sharp psychological thriller that picks at the dark edges of our obsession with social media and the peculiar world of online influencers. Emmy Jackson is an Instagram sensation as @the_mamabare, telling the world all about her trials and...
Fiction at work
‘Workplace’ is a vague, literal term. It’s too broad to conjure an image, though it might summon a feeling. (For some: not here again, for others: here we go!). Nowadays my workplace is also my dinner table, the place where I wrapped Christmas presents I’m yet to give. But old, paused office life was fertile,...
Pictures behind the story
All photographs are packed with stories. They surround us, littering our screens and walls with narrative and memory. Time embalmed. But for each of us, some images are packed fuller than others. Alighting upon a particular combination of light and shade, colour and form, a person we love(d), a fleeting delight – our attention is...
A big thing or a small
Frances Quinn’s debut novel The Smallest Man is inspired by the real-life story of Jeffrey Hudson, who became ‘court dwarf’ and a true friend to Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I. Spanning two decades that changed England forever, it’s a heartening tale of being different, but bold enough to follow your dreams. Where...
