Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books by Leila Mottley, Babanifesi B. Apata, Catherine-Esther Cowie, and Denne Michele Norris.
The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley
Publisher: Knopf
Date: June 24, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House, Leila Mottley
Leila Mottley
Leila Mottley is the author of the novel Nightcrawling, an Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller, and the poetry collection woke up no light. She is also the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live.
The Girls Who Grew Big
From the author of Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.
Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.
The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.
Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends’ secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.
The Forest: A Chase of the Fractured Mind by Babanifesi B. Apata
Publisher: Independent
Date: June 6, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Amazon
Babanifesi B. Apata
Babanifesi B. Apata is a Nigerian writer, creative director, and screenwriter with over 15 years in advertising and Nollywood, where they crafts scripts for producers and consults on film projects. He’s the writer behind the popular Airtel Lost, featuring Gabriel Afoloyan, Amin & Gele, featuring Iya Rainbow and many other Airtel & Netflix Nigeria TV commercials. Inspired by Nigeria’s rich heritage, Babanifesi B. Apata explores mental health narratives in their debut novel, The Forest: A Chase of the Fractured Mind. A passionate advocate for mental health awareness, they blend Hemingway’s raw intensity with Soyinka’s lyrical depth, marking a bold entry into self-publishing.
The Forest: A Chase of the Fractured Mind
Exploring a man’s fractured psyche through the lens of Yoruba spirituality:
Akinwande, an architect, finds himself lost in a forest born from his fractured mind, hunted by a Masquerade. Guided by a spirit child and supported by his siblings, Yejide and TK, his journey through Yoruba mysticism and family bonds becomes a testament to resilience.
When the Harvest Comes by Denne Michele Norris
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Date: April 15, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House
Denne Michele Norris
Denne Michele Norris is the editor in chief of Electric Literature, winner of the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. She co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
When the Harvest Comes
“I got tired of running away from what I should’ve been running toward.”
The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis, to be touched by any man, let alone a white man. He did not raise his son to whisper that man’s name with tenderness.
But on the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar. Never mind that his mother, who died decades before, and his father, whose anger drove Davis to flee their home in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, for a freer life in New York City, won’t be there to walk him down the aisle. All Davis needs to be happy in this life is Everett, his new family, and his burgeoning career as an acclaimed violist.
When Davis learns during the wedding reception that his father has been in a terrible car accident, years of childhood trauma and unspoken emotion resurface. Davis must revisit everything that went wrong between them, risking his fledgling marriage along the way.
In resplendent prose, Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes reveals the pain of inheritance and the heroic power of love, reminding us that, in the end, we are more than the men who came before us.
Heirloom by Catherine-Esther Cowie
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Date: June 26, 2025
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: Carcanet Press
Catherine-Esther Cowie
Catherine-Esther Cowie was born in St Lucia to a Tobagonian father and a St Lucian mother. She migrated with her family to Canada and then to the USA. Her poems have been published in PN Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch Journal, The Common, SWWIM, Rhino Poetry, and others. She is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow.
Heirloom
‘How the noise in my head grows and grows,
splinters into phantoms and shapes,
graceless muses for her cot-mobile.
How I terror.’
Moving from colonial to post-colonial St Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny and terror structure the shapes of women’s lives, and what they hand down to one another.
Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut’s remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie’s powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegise and celebrate her subjects.
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