We wrap up book news for our readers in our regular Book Digest segment with books from Goretti Kyomuhendo, Kwei Quartey, Zadie Smith, and Linda Musita.
Whispers from Vera by Goretti Kyomuhendo
Publisher: African Writers Trust
Date: August 11, 2023
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: African Books Collective, Amazon.
Goretti Kyomuhendo
Goretti Kyomuhendo is a Ugandan novelist, short story writer, and literary activist. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and has published three novels including Waiting published by Feminist Press, New York in 2007 which was translated into Spanish in 2022.
The first Ugandan woman to receive the International Writing Fellowship at the University of Iowa, Kyomuhendo has been recognised for her work as a writer and literary activist nationally and internationally. She is the founding director of the African Writers Trust.
Whispers from Vera
Twenty-nine-year-old Vera is desperate to meet Mr Right after several failed relationships. A high-flyer, Vera is determined to have it all: a husband, family, and an illustrious career. When she meets Eric, a hunky, corporate executive, Vera is elated. Eric is thirty-one, single, and searching. Then a secret of unimaginable magnitude that Eric has kept from Vera surfaces, threatening to destroy their otherwise perfect romance. Will Vera make the necessary sacrifices to keep the flame burning? Set against the vibrancy of the Kampala metropolis in the 2000s, Whispers from Vera is a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek read, enriched with Uglish and local languages. Free-spirited and audacious, Vera documents the whole gamut of her life’s experiences as she navigates through the lows and highs of motherhood and wifehood of a middle-class, modern-day, Ugandan career woman.
Mtama Road by Linda Musita
Publisher: DRR (Down River Road)
Date: August 9, 2023
Genre: Fiction, Short Story Collection
Language: English
Where to find it: Click here.
Linda Musita
Linda Musita is a fiction writer in Nairobi. In 2022 she was selected as a Writer of Note by The de Groot Foundation, through their Courage to Write Grant, for her upcoming novella project Immaculate Pandemic. Linda’s short fiction has been published by DRR, Jalada, Lolwe, Enkare Review, Kikwetu, Fresh Manure, Bloomsbury UK in the Africa 39 Anthology, Goethe Institut in Fresh Paint Vol. 2, among others. One of her short stories Squad was among Brittle Paper’s 79 Notable Pieces of 2017 under the Fiction Category and a top 10 nominee for the Fiction Award in the Inaugural Brittle Paper Literary Awards for The Best of African Literature Online. The Africa 39 Project identified her as one of Africa’s most promising writers under the age of 40 with the potential and talent to define trends in the development of literature from Africa and the African diaspora.
Mtama Road
Mtama Road is Linda Musita’s debut collection of short stories. In these seven stories, all set along Nairobi’s Parklands Mtama Road neighborhood, we are introduced to snapshots, moments, and instances of characters, almost always teenagers, whose lives are connected by virtue of living so close to each other. While the stories are relatable, typical, and even universal childhoods, they have been rendered with such a grace and sense of place and belonging that they might have only happened in and around Mtama Road: City Park, the bowling alleys, Acorn Hall, Nairobi City Park Cemetery. In Boys, one of the longer stories, Iris swears she will not sleep with a boy at the cemetery, watched over by buried corpses and monkeys. The stories presented here are deceptively simple, thanks to Musita’s naturally fluid prose, but they examine characters who are beginning to question the complex worlds around them, teenagers who are becoming more and more aware of the politics of hair, of sex, class distinctions, bad parenting, etc. Stories in an amalgam of the unforgettable late twentieth century R&B, soukous and Kanda Bongoman, barutis and other mischief, pekeles, Patcos.
Last Seen In Lapaz by Kwei Quartey
Publisher: Soho Crime
Date: February 7, 2023
Genre: Fiction, Crime Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Click here, Amazon.
Kwei Quartey
Kwei Quartey was raised in Ghana by an African American mother and a Ghanaian father, both of whom were university lecturers. Dr. Quartey practices medicine in Southern California, rising early in the morning to write before going to work.
As a crime fiction writer, Kwei made the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List in 2009. The following year, the G.O.G. National Book Club awarded him the title of Best Male Author. The five Inspector Darko Dawson novels, set in Ghana, are WIFE OF THE GODS, CHILDREN OF THE STREET, MURDER AT CAPE THREE POINTS, GOLD OF OUR FATHERS, and DEATH BY HIS GRACE. Two novels, KAMILA and DEATH AT THE VOYAGER HOTEL (ebook) are non-Darko books.
In January 2020, Quartey’s new detective series launched to critical acclaim with THE MISSING AMERICAN, the debut of the Emma Djan Investigations and the introduction of the first West African female private eye in fiction. The second in the series, SLEEP WELL, MY LADY, was released January 12, 2021, immediately garnering attention for its unusual style of time shifts in relation to the murder. THE MISSING AMERICAN was a 2021 Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee for Best First PI Novel in 2020, and winner of the 2021 Shamus Award. SLEEP WELL, MY LADY was a 2022 nominee for Best Novel of 2021. The third Emma Djan novel, LAST SEEN IN LAPAZ, will be published February 7, 2023.
Last Seen In Lapaz
Just as things at work are slowing down for PI Emma Djan, an old friend of her boss’s asks for help locating his missing daughter. According to her father, Ngozi had a bright future ahead of her when she became secretive and withdrawn. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was be with her handsome new beau, Femi, instead of attending law school in the fall. So when she disappears from her parents’ house in Nigeria the middle of a summer night, they immediately suspect Femi was behind it and have reason to believe the pair has fled to Accra. During Emma’s first week on the case, Femi is found murdered at his opulent residence in Accra. There are no signs of Ngozi at the scene, and fearing the worst, Emma digs further, discovering that Femi was part of a network of sex traffickers across West Africa. Emma must figure out which of Femi’s many enemies killed him, but more urgently, she must find Ngozi before she, too, is murdered in cold blood.
The Fraud By Zadie Smith
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Date: September 5, 2023
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Click here
Zadie Smith.
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.
The Fraud
From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.
It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.
Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.
The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . .
Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”
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