Book Digest

Book Digest: Kona Mutombo, Tobi Ogundiran, Natalya Din-Kariuki, Julie Iromuanya

Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books from Kona Mutombo, Tobi Ogundiran, Natalya Din-Kariuki, and Julie Iromuanya.

At the Fount of Creation by Tobi Ogundiran

Publisher: Tordotcom
Date:
January 28, 2025
Genre:
Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Language:
English
Where to find it:
Macmillan

Tobi Ogundiran

Tobi Ogundiran
Tobi Ogundiran

Tobi Ogundiran is the award winning author of the Guardian of the Gods duology (In the Shadow of the Fall, At the Fount of Creation) and the critically acclaimed collection Jackal, Jackal. His work has appeared in several Year’s Best anthologies, and on the hit podcast, LeVar Burton Reads. Originally from Nigeria, he now lives and works in the US South.

At the Fount of Creation (Guardians of the Gods, 2)

At the Fount of Creation by Tobi Ogundiran
At the Fount of Creation by Tobi Ogundiran

The fate of the Orisha will be decided in the concluding volume of the Guardians of the Gods duology by award-winning author Tobi Ogundiran. For four hundred years, the world’s remaining Orisha have fought to survive the rapaciousness of the soul-stealing Godkillers and the charismatic words of the singular, mysterious figure who leads them, known as the Teacher. Now they seek to kill the one person whose existence defies their very mandate. Ashâke carries within herself the spirits of the surviving Orisha, and she is on the hunt for allies who can help her defeat the encroaching army of Godkillers. But their influence is everywhere, and no one is immune―not even Ashâke. If she is to succeed, Ashâke will need to answer the question the Godkillers pose―are the Orisha even worth saving?

Efraction by Kona Mutombo

Publisher: Editions Baudelaire
Date:
November 11, 2024
Genre:
Fiction
Language:
French
Where to find it:
Editions Baudelaire, Indigo

Kona Mutombo

Kona Mutombo is a writer from DR Congo.

Efraction

Efraction by Kona Mutombo
Efraction by Kona Mutombo

“Men have destroyed the earth, which is heating up and will heat up even more, through their irrational economic policies. They are not yet aware of what will happen to them tomorrow or the day after. They will continue in their race for unbridled enrichment to destroy this world until they reach the point of no return. Villages, towns and entire countries will disappear…

A Season of Light by Julie Iromuanya

Publisher: Algonquin Books
Date:
February 4, 2025
Genre:
Fiction
Language:
English
Where to find it:
Julie Iromuanya,

Julie Iromuanya

Julie Iromuanya
Julie Iromuanya

Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. She is a 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation fellow, and she was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton. Iromuanya earned her Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an assistant professor for the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago and affiliate faculty of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.

A Season of Light

A Season of Light by Julie Iromuanya
A Season of Light by Julie Iromuanya

When 276 schoolgirls are abducted from their school in Nigeria, Fidelis Ewerike, a Florida-based barrister, poet, and former POW of the Nigerian Civil War, begins to go mad, consumed by memories of his younger sister Ugochi, who went missing during that conflict. Consumed by survivor’s guilt and fearful that the same fate awaits Amara, his sixteen-year-old daughter who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ugochi, Fidelis locks her in her bedroom, offering no words of explanation, only lovingly—if poorly—made meals and sweets.

Amid that singular action, the Ewerike family spirals into chaos: After unsuccessful attempts to free her daughter from her room, his wife Adaobi seeks the counsel of a preacher, praying for spiritual liberation from the curse she is certain has plagued her family since leaving Nigeria. Fourteen-year-old Chuk, beset by his own war with the neighborhood boys, receives a painful education on force, masculinity, and his tenuous position within his family. And rebellious, resentful Amara is hungry for her life to be hers, so the moment she is able to escape her imprisonment, she falls in love—not with the Aba-born engineer-in-training her mother envisages, but with Maksym Kostyk, the son of the town drunk. Before long, the two have concocted a plan to run away from the trappings of their familial traumas.

Perfect for readers of Sing, Unburied, Sing, Julie Iromuanya’s A Season of Light is an all-consuming masterpiece. To peer into the window of the Ewerike family’s lives is a gift.

Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms edited by Natalya Din-Kariuki, Subha Mukherji, Rowan Williams

Publisher: Punctum Books
Date:
November 30, 2024
Genre:
Nonfiction, Anthology
Language:
English
Where to find it:
Punctum Books

Natalya Din-Kariuki

Natalya Din-Kariuki
Natalya Din-Kariuki

Natalya Din-Kariuki is from Nairobi. Migration has played an important part in her family’s history: her maternal grandfather was a stowaway on a dhow from India to Kenya in the 1930s. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, where she works on the literary and intellectual history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular focus on travel writing, transnational and transcultural encounters, and rhetoric and poetics. This work is published or forthcoming in journals, such as the Review of English Studies, Huntington Library Quarterly, and Textual Practice. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Leeds, the Folger Institute, the University of Edinburgh, and the Newberry Library.

Contributors

Faraj Alnasser, Aditi Anand, Anupam Basu, Clelia Bartoli, Yota Batsaki, Gillian Beer, Annabel Brett, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Valentina Castagna, Amit Chaudhuri, Supriya Chaudhuri, Nadina Christopoulou, Brian Cummings, Rosita D’Amora, Edmund de Waal, Olga Demetriou, Saifoudiny (Dine) Diallo, Valerie Forman, John Gallagher, Jonathan Gil Harris, Simon Goldhill, Mina Gorji, Akid Hassan, Gabriel Josipovici, Dragana Jurišić, Bhanu Kapil, Issam Kourbaj, TM Krishna, Angela Leighton, Sue McAlpine, Joe Murphy, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Joe Robertson, Claudia Roden, Mohamed Sarrar, Efi Savvides, Regina Schwartz, Rachel Spence, A.E. Stallings, Susan Stockwell, Carla Suthren, Marina Warner, Clair Wills, Pip Williams

Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms

Crossings Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms edited by Natalya Din Kariuki
Crossings Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms edited by Natalya Din Kariuki

Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms brings together activists, artists, scholars, and migrants with diverse histories to explore what the experience of migration does with, and to, knowledge, and how its own ways of knowing find expressive form. As the volume’s authors think about physical and imaginative crossings, and the traversals and transactions of knowledge they entail, the book itself crosses and complicates disciplinary and formal boundaries and the barriers between critical and creative intervention. Crucially, it brings together voices and forms emerging out of the experience of dislocation with responses to the encounters it generates. The volume’s discussions begin in the early modern world, and move freely across periods to dwell on the urgent experience of migrancy in our own times, while also responding to an urgent need to connect the local with the global experience of migrant knowledge and migrant aesthetics. Crossings stakes the claim that creative art, backed by humanities-based thinking, can meet the imaginative and ethical demands that the unknowable reality of mass displacement places on us, in a way that governments, institutions, and public discourse have calamitously failed to do. But aesthetic practice itself needs to be re-positioned if it is to rise to these political and human challenges, negotiating the points of friction between its own predilections and the matter of migration. Crossings offers “migrant forms” – forms that cross boundaries naturally and are “knowing” about crossings – and offers as the means of this imaginative re-orientation a tool for activating a radical alternative to economic models of social benefit. Crossings takes its place in an emergent ecology of migrant forms, both speaking to and participating in that ecology.

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