Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books from Ben Okri, Onke Mazibuko, Leye Adenle, and Jason Allen-Paisant.
Canary by Onke Mazibuko
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Date: March 1, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House South Africa
Onke Mazibuko
Onke Mazibuko is a psychologist, author, and educator. He has experience working in state owned entities, which informed the writing of Canary. His first book, The Second Verse, received glowing reviews from the press and public. Onke lives in Johannesburg.
Canary
Maks Ntaka has a target on his back.
After years of loyal work for Arms-Tech Industries, Maks has found proof of serious corruption in his department. Tender fraud, illegal kickbacks, inflated contracts, the same old story. Maks wants to do something about it, turn whistleblower. What else can a good man do?
But who can he tell if he can’t trust anyone? The people in charge seem complicit, while the rest turn a blind eye. Soon suspicions cloud the office, and all the knives are out for whoever turns on them first. As Maks prepares his disclosures, he discovers that his longtime mentor has implicated him in the illegalities. Not only is he being set up by his company, but some foreign nationals with deep pockets are also on his trail looking for their cut. For Maks, the walls are closing in, and danger waits at every turn. Meanwhile, his own private indiscretions are coming to light, and soon his life starts collapsing around him.
In this compelling and harrowing account of a whistleblower, Onke Mazibuko creates a nail-biting, paranoid thriller about a good man pushed to the limit. Drawing from all too real instances of corruption and collapse, this book shows what such a system does to those who still listen to their conscience.
What is a good man to do when your own company made the bullet with your name on it?
Spur des Geldes by Leye Adenle
Publisher: InterKontinental Verlag
Date: March 24, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: German (Translated from English by Yasemin Dinçer)
Where to find it: InterKontinental Verlag, Amazon
Leye Adenle
Leye Adenle is a Nigerian crime and thriller author known for his suspenseful stories that explore the depths of human nature. His works have been published in Key Locations (InterKontinental, 2023), Lagos Noir (Akashic Books, 2018), and Sunshine Noir (White Sun Books, 2016), among others. Reins of Power won the 2016 Prix Marianne; his short story “The Assassin” was shortlisted for the 2017 CWA Short Story Dagger. Adenle’s writing is characterized by gritty realism and vivid descriptions that capture the complex realities of Nigerian society, often misunderstood by outsiders. His novels address corruption, inequality, and violence, while simultaneously illuminating the humanity of their characters and their choices under adverse circumstances. He is an advocate for gender equality, and this is reflected in his texts, which often focus on the experiences of women in Nigerian society.
Yasemin DinÇer
Yasemin DinÇer studied literary translation in Düsseldorf and has translated from English for various publishers. She has translated works by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Lo. lá Ákínmádé Åkerström, and Minna Salami, among others, and is a multiple recipient of scholarships from the German Translator’s Fund.
Spur des Geldes (English: Trail of Money)
Leye Adenles fulminante Thriller-Trilogie blickt aus verschiedenen Winkeln auf eine Welt der Extreme, immer im pulsierenden Rythmus der westafrikanischen Megacity Lagos. In Spur des Geldes kehrt Amaka zurück und wird in einen politischen Skandal verwickelt: Der Gouverneurskandidat kommt bei einem Flugzeugabsturz ums Leben. Nun macht die Partei Chief Ojo zu seinem Nachfolger. Dessen Leichen im Keller kennt niemand besser als Amaka und so gerät sie zunehmend in den Sog eines aus Korruption, Gewalt, Sex und Macht bestehenden Systems, bei dem es am Ende ums nackte Überleben geht.
The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican memoir of plants and dreams by Jason Allen-Paisant
Publisher: Penguin
Date: March 20, 2025
Genre: Nonfiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin
Jason Allen-Paisant
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and multi-award-winning poet. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry, Thinking with Trees and Self-Portrait as Othello, which won the UK’s two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023 — the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize. He is also a Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and Associate Editor of Callaloo Literary Journal. Jason lives in Leeds with his partner and two children.
The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican memoir of plants and dreams
The Possibility of Tenderness is a personal history narrated through the lens of the ‘grung’ and plants. It’s also a people’s history of the land, a family saga, an archival detective story through time. It’s the migration tale of a young scholar who arrives in Britain from rural Jamaica to study at Oxford to achieve ‘upward social mobility’ and who now lives in Roundhay Leeds. Suddenly, amidst his journey of dreams and class aspiration, the plants and people of his native district, Coffee Grove, begin to offer different ways of living, alternative dreams, and the possibility of tenderness and the permission to roam England.
Marrying the local and the familial with global history and unfolding as a timely and immersive tale of land, environment, and the world of plants, The Possibility of Tenderness reveals how the history of a tiny rural village in a mountainous region of Jamaica is interlinked with that of modern Britain. And, also what that rural village can teach us about leisure, land ownership and reclamation today.
Mama, the author’s grandmother, is a central protagonist of the story. Alongside her, herbalists, plant workers, farmers, and plant lovers help forge an intimate portrait of Coffee Grove, as do the plants themselves; fever grass, jointa, search mi heart, leaf of life, helping Allen-Paisant revise his sense of self and solidify a new understanding of his place in the world.
The Possibility of Tenderness is a cross-pollinating book about the transformative power of plants, the legacy of dreams, and the lessons they offer for living with the earth.
Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted by Ben Okri
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Date: March 6, 2025
Genre: Fiction, Magical Realism
Language: English
Where to find it: Bloomsbury Publishing
Ben Okri
Ben Okri is a playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, short-story writer, anthologist, and aphorist. He has also written film scripts. His works have won numerous national and international prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction. His books include the eco-fable Every Leaf a Hallelujah, the play Changing Destiny, the genre-bending climate fiction Tiger Work, the poetry collections A Fire in My Head and Mental Fight, and Wild, and the novels Astonishing the Gods, The Last Gift of the Master Artists, and Dangerous Love. In 2023 he received a knighthood for services to literature.
Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted
What do you do when your heart has been made a wasteland by love?
Viv, who’s in the House of Lords, had the idea for the festival on the twentieth anniversary of the day her first husband left her. Six months later, crowds descend on the grounds of a dreamlike chateau in the South of France, avidly awaiting the experience of a lifetime, Viv’s inaugural Festival for the Broken-Hearted.
Everyone is in fancy dress. No one knows who anyone is. They wander the beautiful woods with just one night to change everything. And to crown it all, a very special guest is expected: world-renowned clairvoyant and fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, known as the wisest woman in Europe, and not seen since the pages of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. She will attend for one night only.
But will she actually appear at all, or will Viv’s carefully orchestrated festival fall to pieces? Will Viv and her husband make it through the night? Will anyone else?
Part vision, part mystery, this story of a midsummer night’s madness is also an homage to Eliot’s famous poem, in Ben Okri’s inimitable style, as alive with echoes and reverberations as the enchanted forest itself. Think Ingmar Bergman meets William Shakespeare, with a dash of Mozart.
Hearts will be healed, and hearts broken, but nobody will leave this festival exactly as they arrived.
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