In our regular Book Digest segment, we wrap up book news for our readers with books from Eugen Bacon, Melanie Raabe, Monique Roffey, and David Mandessi Diop.
A Place Between Waking and Forgetting by Eugen Bacon
Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press
Date: September 19, 2024
Genre: Fiction, short stories
Language: English
Where to find it: Raw Dog Screaming Press
Eugen Bacon
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author of several novels and collections. She’s a British Fantasy Award winner, a Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in other awards. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’, and was a 2024 Philip K Dick Award nominee. Eugen’s creative work has appeared worldwide, including in Apex Magazine, Award Winning Australian Writing, Fantasy, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.
A Place Between Waking and Forgetting
A Place Between Waking and Forgetting is dark speculative fiction, an Afro-Irreal collection in which transformative stories of culture, diversity, climate change, unlimited futures, collisions of worlds, mythology, and more, inhabit. It cases black people stories in bold and evocative text, at times deeply flawed but potentially redeemable protagonists in rich hues of blackness and light. Something beautiful, something dark in lyrical language packed with affection, dread, anguish and hope.
Featuring the World Fantasy Award finalist story “The Devil Don’t Come With Horns”, this collection of short stories is the latest offering by a genre-bending, multi-award winner.
It arrives with a poetic introduction by award-winning writer and poet Linda D. Addison, the first African-American recipient of the world-renowned HWA Bram Stoker Award, and has received five awards for her collections. Addison has been honored with the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award, HWA Mentor of the Year and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry.
Passiontide by Monique Roffey
Publisher: Knopf
Date: September 10, 2024
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House, Penguin
Monique Roffey
Monique Roffey is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of seven books, four of which are set in Trinidad and the Caribbean region. The Mermaid of Black Conch won the 2020 Costa Book of the Year Award and was short-listed for several other major prizes. Roffey’s work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Wasafiri, and The Independent. She was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and educated in the United Kingdom. Her website is moniqueroffey.com.
Passiontide
Early one morning, at the close of St Colibri’s carnival, a young female steel-pan player is found dead beneath a cannonball tree. It is a discovery that will transform the lives of everyone on this small island.
As the days pass, this shocking event draws together four women. There’s Sharleen, a journalist with an eye for the real story. Her childhood friend Tara, the pink-haired, straight-talking star of the activism scene. Gigi, the ‘notorious’ founder of the Port Isabella Sex Workers Collective. And Daisy, first lady of St Colibri, who is haunted by a disappearance in her own family decades ago.
In a community in which women’s voices are often silenced and violence against them is often overlooked, the group soon find themselves compelled to speak out – and to act. But even they could never have foreseen the consequences of their courage…
Passiontide is a fiercely alive novel about women daring to imagine a different world. It confirms Monique Roffey as one of our most spellbinding storytellers.
De Langste Schlaf by Melanie Raabe
Publisher: btb Verlag
Date: September 18, 2024
Genre: Fiction
Language: German
Where to find it: Penguin
Melanie Raabe
Melanie Raabe is a German author and podcaster. She debuted with the psychological thriller The Trap in 2015, followed by The Stranger (2016), The Shadow (2018), and The Woods (2019). Her first work of non-fiction is a book on creativity (2020). In 2022, Raabe published her first literary novel in Germany. Her work is published in more than 20 countries. She lives in the city of Cologne.
De Langste Schlaf
About sleep and insomnia, about dreams and the ghosts of the past.
In the life of the young scientist Mara Lux, almost everything revolves around the topic of sleep. The Londoner by choice is a leading researcher in this field, but at the same time she herself has suffered from tormenting insomnia for many years. She fears her dreams, which sometimes seem to spill over into reality in an inexplicable way. Mara, who is not only thoroughly rational but also likes to have everything under control, finds this very difficult. She is hardly ever in Germany, her parents died young, so Mara is more than a little surprised when one day she receives a message from a notary in Frankfurt: someone wants to leave her a large, old mansion in the German provinces, anonymously. Mara believes it is a case of mistaken ownership – but, curious, travels to the small town that is unfamiliar to her to see it all. She is astonished to discover that her dreams have connected her to this place in a strange way.
The new novel by Melanie Raabe – about sleep and insomnia, about dreams and the ghosts of the past, about secrets and the loss of loved ones, about pausing and moving on.
Hammer Blows by David Mandessi Diop
Publisher: Apollo
Date: March 1, 2024
Genre: Poetry
Language: English (translated from French)
Where to find it: Bloomsbury
David Mandessi Diop
David Mandessi Diop (1927 – 1960) was a French West African poet known for his contribution to the Négritude literary movement. His work reflects his anti-colonial stance.
Hammer Blows
In this English translation of Hammer Blows, the famous collection of poems by renowned writer David Diop is presented in all its brilliance and wit. First published in 1956, this powerful collection was written during the height of the Negritude movement in France. Posthumously translated into English as Hammer Blows, Diop’s voice offers a passionate critique of slavery in the American South and colonialism in Africa. Edited and translated from the French by Simon Mpondo and Frank Jones.
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