In our regular Book Digest segment, we spotlight new books from Léonora Miano, Duduzile Noeleen Ngwenya, Esinam Bediako, and Evelyne Waithira Müller.
you get better with love by Duduzile Noeleen Ngwenya
Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
Date: October 8, 2024
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: Pan Macmillan South Africa
Duduzile Noeleen Ngwenya
Duduzile Noeleen Ngwenya is a writer and entrepreneur from Hammanskraal, Pretoria, South Africa. The former magazine editor and life coach is passionate about mental health and self-development and aims to inspire others to heal and grow in self-love and self-acceptance. She has self-published two bestselling books, Things I Never Said to Myself and This Time You Return to Yourself.
you get better with love
you get better with love takes you on the journey of embracing vulnerability in its rawest form. Exploring fears, insecurities, love experiences and the yearning for acceptance, the author weaves a narrative of prose and poetry delving into the heart of human emotion. This collection of poetry is a testament to the power of owning one’s feelings and thoughts, showcasing a delicate balance between personal and universal experiences. As a way of symbolising individuality and how we don’t have to constrain ourselves to one thing, the author uses lower-case typography and invites you to reflect on your struggles and triumphs. As each page turns, you get better with love offers a comforting reminder that as long as we breathe, there is an opportunity to begin anew, love oneself fully, and embrace the endless possibilities that come with choosing to try again.
Blood on the Brain by Esinam Bediako
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Date: September 17, 2024
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Red Hen Press
Esinam Bediako
Esinam Bediako is a Ghanaian American writer from Detroit. She holds a BA in English from Columbia University, an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MAT in Secondary English from University of Southern California. A finalist for the Porter House Review Editor’s Prize, the Frontier Global Poetry Prize, and North American Review’s Terry Tempest Williams Prize, Esinam has been a high school English teacher and administrator. Her most important job is editing the masterpieces of her two young sons, who create stories, poems, and videos with enviable speed and imagination. Esinam lives in Claremont, California with her family.
Blood on the Brain
An impulsive, madcap, and newly concussed young woman comes of age as she navigates her Ghanaian American identity, her relationships, and the muddled landscape of history, memory, imagination, and delusion. Twenty-four-year-old Akosua is easily knocked off her feet. When she falls and hits her head, she’s too preoccupied with her latest dramas to fully absorb the shock. In the span of three months, she has broken up with her boyfriend Wisdom, discovered that her deadbeat dad has moved back to the States from Ghana, and dropped so many classes that she believes she’s the only history grad student in the history of grad students to be registered for just one partial-credit class. Instead of facing her problems, Akosua seeks distraction in Daniel, a “good Ghanaian man.” But as her head injury worsens, she questions whether she can continue to run away from her father any more than she can keep ignoring her brain and its traumas. Vibrant, funny, and bittersweet, Blood on the Brain is a novel about the complications of family, romance, and culture—and how coming of age can feel like a blow to the head.
Frau Müller, die Migrantin by Evelyne Waithira Müller
Publisher: Bonifatius Verlag
Date: October 9, 2024
Genre: Nonfiction
Language: German
Where to find it: Bonifatius Verlag,
Evelyne Waithira Müller
Evelyne Waithira Müller was born in Kenya in 1985 and was a professional soldier in the British military as a young woman. She gained further professional experience in refugee work, counseling and prevention work against Islamist extremism, and in telephone counseling. Since 2019, the religious psychologist has been working part-time as a freelance speaker and trainer on the topics of happiness and a meaningful life, confidence in difficult times, self-esteem, and self-acceptance and migration. She is married and the mother of a son.
Frau Müller, die Migrantin (English: Mrs. Müller, the migrant)
“Müller? Are you the wife of the TV chef?” Evelyne Müller is often asked questions like this. “No, I’m Thomas Müller’s sister,” she replies, exposing the absurdity of such a well-meaning remark. After a few years, they have gotten used to each other: the immigrant and the country in which she lives. At first, however, she had to face a number of challenges when trying to gain a foothold in Germany: loneliness, confrontation with racism, the inevitable culture shock and the feeling of being an outsider. In her book, she writes honestly, grippingly and humorously about how she overcame the obstacles she faced as an immigrant from Kenya. In doing so, she reflects on her own experiences and places them in a larger social context. Without accusing, she holds up a mirror to her fellow human beings and unobtrusively encourages them to question their own behavior. By telling how she managed to find her way in what was initially a foreign culture, she shows ways of dealing with personal challenges and growing from them.
Les aventures de la foufoune by Léonora Miano
Publisher: Seuil
Date: October 11, 2024
Genre: Nonfiction
Language: French
Where to find it: Seuil
Léonora Miano
Novelist, playwright and essayist, Léonora Miano is the author of some twenty works. She received the Prix Goncourt des lycéens in 2006 for Contours du jour qui vient (Plon), the Seligmann Prize against racism in 2012 for Écrits pour la parole (L’Arche), the Prix Femina and the Grand Prix du roman métis in 2013 for La Saison de l’ombre (Grasset). At Seuil, she published L’Opposé de la Blancheur. Reflections on the white problem (2023).
Les Aventures de la Foufoune (English: The pussy is revolutionary)
The pussy is revolutionary, not so in love these days, a marine star, in sleeping wood. The pussy is on the wet finger, or from the open sea, or from the red night. She is in love, but there you go… She is from the early days.
And if women’s sex was both the origin of the world and its center? It is exploring this question that Léonora Miano designs the ten episodes of the Adventures of the pussy, a series of monologues carried by the intimate experience of women. We discover the true story of the beginnings of the world, of initiatory rites, of joyful or cruel slices of life, always having at their heart the sex of a woman.
Léonora Miano carries, with rage, humor, insolence, in a sometimes crude language, the voices of women’s freedom. A sensual, jubilant, subversive, disturbing exploration, which makes you think as much as it makes you feel. A work of astonishing beauty.
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