We wrap up book news for our readers in our regular Book Digest segment with books from David Diop, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Romeo Oriogun, and Kacen Callender.
Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date: September 7, 2023
Genre: Fiction
Language: French
Where to find it: Click here.
David Diop
David Diop was born in Paris and was raised in Senegal. He is the head of the Arts, Languages, and Literature Department at the University of Pau, where his research includes such topics as eighteenth-century French literature and European representations of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His second novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, was awarded the International Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction.
Beyond the Door of No Return
The thrilling and deeply moving new novel by David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize. Paris, 1806.
The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman’s name: Maram.
The key to this mysterious woman’s identity is Adanson’s unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is tragic: Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant. A young woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, Maram was sold into slavery but managed to escape from the Island of Gorée—a major embarkation point of the transatlantic slave trade—to a small village hidden in the forest. While on a research expedition in West Africa as a young man, Adanson hears the story of the revenant and becomes obsessed with finding her. Accompanied by his guide, he ventures deep into the Senegalese bush on a journey that reveals not only the savagery of the French colonial occupation but also the unlikely transports of the human heart.
Written with sensitivity and narrative flair, David Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story like few others. Drawing on the richness and lyricism of Senegal’s oral traditions, Diop has constructed a historical epic of the highest order.
Digging Stars by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Date: September 12, 2023.
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: click here.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of Digging Stars: A Novel and House of Stone: A Novel (W. W. Norton, 2019), which won the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, and was listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Balcones Fiction Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Tshuma has lectured on House of Stone at the University of Oxford in England, the Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden, and Vassar College in New York, among others. Her Oxford lecture, “Hewing Fiction from History,” was subsequently published in the scholarly journal JSAS, the Journal for Southern African Studies (Vol 47, 2021). She is currently a professor of fiction at Emerson College.
Digging Stars
Blending drama and satire while examining the complexities of colonialism, racism, and what it means to be American, Digging Stars probes the emotional universes of love, friendship, family, and nationhood.
With admission to The Program, an elite interdisciplinary graduate cohort at the forefront of astronomy and technology, Rosa’s dreams are finally within reach. Her research into the cosmos follows in the footsteps of her astronomer father’s revolutionary work in Bantu geometries and Indigenous astronomies. A bona fide genius, he transformed the scientific landscape by fusing the best of Western and Indigenous scientific thought. Yet since his death during her childhood, Rosa has been plagued by anxiety attacks she dubs “The Terrors”―and by unresolved questions about her father’s life. Who is his mysterious friend Mr. C? Who was her father, really?
Ambitious, hungry for success, and determined to soar, Rosa joins the ranks of America’s smartest. Her cohort of talented Fellows includes Shaniqua, her roommate, who is analyzing melanin molecules and their capacity to conduct electricity; Richard, an expert in quantum mechanics; Mausi, studying Indigenous American scientific thought; and Péralte, Rosa’s estranged stepbrother whose obsessive videogaming has inspired him to become a programmer. Her classmates challenge Rosa’s understanding of identity, personhood, the ethics of technology, and, most painfully, her adulation of her father, whose legacy is more complicated than it appears.
Digging Stars is a paean to the cosmos and a celebration of the democratic spirit of knowledge. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s characters explode the rigid matrices of the academy to prove that science, art, technology, and history are all planets orbiting the same sun.
The Gathering of Bastards by Romeo Oriogun
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Date: October 1, 2023
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: Click here.
Romeo Oriogun
Award-winning Nigerian poet and essayist Romeo Oriogun is the winner of the Nigerian Prize for Literature and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. His previous titles are the poetry collections Nomad (2022), Sacrament of Bodies (2020), and three chapbooks.
The Gathering of Bastards
The Gathering of Bastards chronicles the movement of migrants as they navigate borders both internal and external. At the heart of these poems of vulnerability and sharp intelligence, the poet himself is the perpetual migrant embarked on forced journeys that take him across nations in West and North Africa, through Europe, and through American cities as he navigates the challenges of living through terror and loss and wrestles with the meaning of home.
Stars in Your Eyes By Kacen Callender
Publisher: Hachette
Date: October 10, 2023
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Click here.
Kacen Callender
Kacen Callender is a bestselling and award-winning author of multiple novels for children, teens, and adults, including the National Book Award-winning King and the Dragonflies and the bestselling novel Felix Ever After. Kacen enjoys playing RPG video games, practicing their art, and focusing on healing and growth in their free time.
Stars in Your Eyes
The National Book Award-winning author of Felix Ever After delivers a beautifully tender story of two grumpy/sunshine, fake-dating actors navigating their love story both on and offscreen—perfect for fans of Casey McQuiston and Alexis Hall.
Logan Gray is Hollywood’s bad boy—a talented but troubled actor who the public loves to hate. Mattie Cole is an up‑and‑coming golden boy, adored by all but plagued by insecurities.
When Logan and Mattie are cast as leads in a new romantic film, Logan claims that Matt has “zero talent,” sending the film’s publicity into a nosedive. To create positive buzz, the two are persuaded into a fake‑dating scheme—but as the two actors get to know their new characters, real feelings start to develop.
As public scrutiny intensifies and old wounds resurface, the two must fight for their relationship and their love.
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