We wrap up book news for our readers in our regular Book Digest segment with books from O O Sangoyomi, Orlaine McDonald, Dinaw Mengestu, and Florent Raoul Couao-Zotti.
Comment tuer dix fois un criminel by Florent Raoul Couao-Zotti
Publisher: Editions Continents
Date: April 23, 2024
Genre: Fiction, Short Story Collection
Language: French
Where to find it: Bookconeckt
Florent Raoul Couao-Zotti
Florent Couao-Zotti is a writer of comics, plays, and short stories, who lives in Cotonou, Benin. He is fond of employing the short-story as a form. He is also editor of several satirical magazines and a cultural columnist.
Comment tuer dix fois un criminal (English: How to kill a criminal ten times)
How to kill a criminal ten times? The question may seem trivial, but it is important. We can try to follow Couao-Zotti to understand the mystery of the prior resurrection of the criminal, who, in any case, must be a subject who defies time and the bullets of his adversaries. Or who benefits from special protections, who knows.
In this collection of eight short stories, the master of the new wave of Beninese writers takes his readers on a journey by leading them to discover the mysteries hidden in things that we may find insignificant. It is a surprising Benin, a secret and melancholic Africa that the writer sings about in this umpteenth work whose composition reveals his maturity and his thunderous laughter. I am pleased to offer it to you as a viaticum, in your passion for great inner journeys.
Masquerade by O O Sangoyomi
Publisher: Forge Books
Date: July 2, 2024
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: MacMillan
O O Sangoyomi
O.O. Sangoyomi is a Nigerian American author. During a childhood of constantly moving around, she found an anchored home in the fictional worlds of books. Sangoyomi is a recent graduate of Princeton University, where she studied literature. Her debut novel, Masquerade, will be published by Macmillan/Forge in July 2024.
Masquerade
Set in a wonderfully reimagined 15th century West Africa, Masquerade is a dazzling, lyrical tale exploring the true cost of one woman’s fight for freedom and self-discovery, and the lengths she’ll go to secure her future.
Òdòdó’s hometown of Timbuktu has been conquered by the the warrior king of Yorùbáland. Already shunned as social pariahs, living conditions for Òdòdó and the other women in her blacksmith guild grow even worse under Yorùbá rule.
Then Òdòdó is abducted. She is whisked across the Sahara to the capital city of Ṣàngótẹ̀, where she is shocked to discover that her kidnapper is none other than the vagrant who had visited her guild just days prior. But now that he is swathed in riches rather than rags, Òdòdó realizes he is not a vagrant at all; he is the warrior king, and he has chosen her to be his wife.
In a sudden change of fortune, Òdòdó soars to the very heights of society. But after a lifetime of subjugation, the power that saturates this world of battle and political savvy becomes too enticing to resist. As tensions with rival states grow, revealing elaborate schemes and enemies hidden in plain sight, Òdòdó must defy the cruel king she has been forced to wed by re-forging the shaky loyalties of the court in her favor, or risk losing everything—including her life.
Loosely based on the myth of Persephone, O.O. Sangoyomi’s Masquerade takes you on a journey of epic power struggles and political intrigue that turn an entire region on its head.
Someone Like Us By Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher: Knopf
Date: July 30, 2024
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House
Dinaw Mengestu
Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names, How to Read the Air, and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Jane, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Prize, Guardian First Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list in 2010.
Someone Like Us
The son of Ethiopian immigrants seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home.
After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.
With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he’d been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel’s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America’s most prodigiously gifted novelists.
No Small Thing by Orlaine McDonald
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Date: July 18, 2024
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Serpent’s Tail
Orlaine McDonald
Orlaine McDonald is a writer of mixed Jamaican and Irish heritage, and lives in London. This is her first novel.
No Small Thing
An exceptional Black British debut filled with desire and jeopardy and set on a south London estate. For a year, the three of them live in the flat below Earl’s on the Blossom View Estate. Livia, who has been running for long enough to think her past might never catch up with her. But now she’s been forced to catch her breath and face the daughter she left behind. Mickey, who is angry: about having a mother who left, a father who died, about the mess she’s made of her life. And with no other place to go, she’s forced to need the very person who abandoned her. And Summer, whose new grandmother is weird, and whose mum is always sad or out looking for men to distract her. Left to roam, she seeks refuge with new friends, ones who are willing to give her the attention that Mickey won’t. But who are these kind strangers, and will they keep her safe? When the year ends, the family of three becomes two. Burning with hope and desire, this is a debut novel about motherhood, class and race, which sings a soulful song about the damage we do to the people we love most.
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