We wrap up book news for our readers in our regular Book Digest segment with books from Farai Mudzingwa, Safiya Sinclair, Stefanie Hirsbrunner, and Tlotlo Tsamaase.
Avenues by Train By Farai Mudzingwa
Publisher: Cassava Republic
Date: September 25, 2023
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Click here.
Farai Mudzingwa
Farai Mudzingwa is a Zimbabwean writer whose fiction is influenced by music, our interior selves and alternate realities. He has previously published a short fiction – Green Shadows in the Kiya Kiya Republic – and short stories in Weaver Press anthologies, Kwani?, Writivism, Storymoja and Short Story Day Africa. His profiles, literature reviews and political essays have appeared in New Frame, Chimurenga Chronic, The Africa Report, New Humanitarian, TRT News, Contemporary& and Mail & Guardian.
Avenues by Train
When seven-year-old Jedza witnesses a tragic incident involving a train and the death of his close boyhood friend in his hometown Miner’s Drift, he is convinced that his life is haunted. Now in his mid-20s, Jedza is a down-and-out electrician, moving to Harare in the hopes that he will escape the darkness and superstitions of the small town. But living in the shadowy restless atmosphere of the Avenues with its mysterious pools of water rising under musasa trees, he is tormented by the disappearance of his sister and their early encounters with ancestral spirits, the shapeshifting power of the njuzu and a vengeful ngozi. To move forward, he must stop running away and confront the trauma of his past. An eclectic, experimental novel, AVENUES BY TRAIN is a brash and confident debut by an exciting new voice.
How to Say Babylon| A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair
Publisher: Simon & Shuster
Date: October 3, 2023
Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Language: English
Where to find it: Click here.
Safiya Sinclair
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.
How to Say Babylon| A Memoir
With echoes of Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.
Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.
In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them.
How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.
Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.
Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase
Publisher: Erewhon Books
Date: April 11, 2023
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Erewhon Books, Jacana (South Africa only)
Tlotlo Tsamaase
Tlotlo Tsamaase is a Motswana writer whose novella, The Silence of Wilting Skin, is a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and was the first Motswana nominee for the Rhysling Award. Tlotlo received support from the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, and their story Behind Our Irises jointly won the Nommo Award. Their short fiction has appeared in multiple best-of anthologies, Africa Risen, New Suns 2, Chiral Mad 5, and other publications.
Womb City
This genre-bending Africanfuturist horror novel blends The Handmaid’s Tale with Get Out in an adrenaline-packed, cyberpunk body-hopping ghost story exploring motherhood, memory, and a woman’s right to her own body.
Nelah seems to have it all: fame, wealth, and a long-awaited daughter growing in a government lab. But, trapped in a loveless marriage to a policeman who uses a microchip to monitor her every move, Nelah’s perfect life is precarious. After a drug-fueled evening culminates in an eerie car accident, Nelah commits a desperate crime and buries the body, daring to hope that she can keep one last secret.
The truth claws its way into Nelah’s life from the grave.
As the ghost of her victim viciously hunts down the people Nelah holds dear, she is thrust into a race against the clock: in order to save any of her remaining loved ones, Nelah must unravel the political conspiracy her victim was on the verge of exposing—or risk losing everyone.
Set in a cruel futuristic surveillance state where bodies are a government-issued resource, this harrowing story is a twisty, nail-biting commentary on power, monstrosity, and bodily autonomy. In sickeningly evocative prose, Womb City interrogates how patriarchy pits women against each other as unwitting collaborators in their own oppression. In this devastatingly timely debut novel, acclaimed short fiction writer Tlotlo Tsamaase brings a searing intelligence and Botswana’s cultural sensibility to the question: just how far must a woman go to bring the whole system crashing down?
Could This Be Love?/ Kann das denn Liebe sein? edited by Stefanie Hirsbrunner
Publisher: InterKontinental Verlag
Date: September 14, 2022
Genre: Nonfiction, Essays
Language: English, German
Where to find it: Amazon, InterKontinental Verlag
Stefanie Hirsbrunner
Stefanie Hirsbrunner, a political scientist, is the author of several non-fiction books, including Sorry about Colonialism and Hotel Fünf Sterne (Engl: “Hotel Five Stars”). Her anthology Afrika:Radikal neu denken? (Engl: Africa: rethinking radically?) which she co-edited was published in 2016. Since 2018, she has run the book store InterKontinental in Berlin, which was honoured with the German award forbookstores (“Deutscher Buchhandlungspreis”) in 2021. Furthermore, she is a board member of the InterKontinental association which seeks to promote African literature in Germany and functions as the director of the African Book Festival in Berlin.
Could This Be Love?/ Kann das denn Liebe sein?
Love as a unique experience is what we individually make of it. But how equal and free are we really when choosing our partners? What do some couples go through in their everyday attempts to simply be together? In the form of personal essays, the authors of this book courageously provide insight into their private lives. They report on what happens in romantic relationships when race, origin or culture become an issue. Based on their own experiences, their texts explore in a sharp, stirring and thoughtful way whether we can still find each other in a world that is still deeply divided. With a foreword by Emilia Roig. With contributions from Marie-Sophie Adeoso, Tshiwa Trudie Amulungu, Josephine Apraku, Aseman G. Bahadori, Clementine E. Burnley, Tammi L. Coles, Jude Dibia, Katrin Diop, Kalaf Epalanga, Stefanie Hirsbrunner, Bhekisisa Mncube, Yara Nakahanda Monteiro, Goitseone Montsho, Jennifer Neal, Ifeatu Nnaobi
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