Book Digest

Book Digest: Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Eduardo Quive, Soraya Palmer, Éric Mukendi

We wrap up book news for our readers in our regular Book Digest segment with books from Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Eduardo Quive, Soraya Palmer, and Éric Mukendi,

Azukar by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
Date: June 8, 2023
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Peepal Tree Press, Amazon.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Nii Ayikwei Parkes Photo/Elikem Akpalu
Nii Ayikwei Parkes Photo/Elikem Akpalu

Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a Ghanaian-British writer and editor who has won acclaim as a children’s author, poet, broadcaster and novelist. Winner of multiple international awards including the ACRAG award, his novel Tail of the Blue Bird won France’s two major prizes for translated fiction – Prix Baudelaire and Prix Laure Bataillon – in 2014. Nii Ayikwei is the founder of flipped eye publishing, a leading small press, serves on the boards of World Literature Today and the AKO Caine Prize, and was chair of judges for the 2020 Commonwealth Prize. Currently Producer of Literature and Talks at Brighton Festival, he is the author of two collections of poetry The Makings of You (2010) and The Geez (2020), both published by Peepal Tree Press.

Azukar

Azukar by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Azúcar (sugar) is a novel about belonging in a world where all things are on the move: people, ideas, foods and not least music. Oswald Kole Osabutey Jnr, henceforth Yunior, leaves his family in Accra to travel to the mythical Caribbean island of Fumaz (think tobacco) where the revolutionary philosophy of peopleism just about keeps its flame alive against the forces of an old-style command centre political bureaucracy and a stifling trade blockade from the big imperialist neighbour to the North. Yunior brings the knowledge of the scientist, the skills of a farmer and the heart and invention of a musician to his life in Fumaz. As scientist, he must find some way of rescuing the island’s famed sweet rice industry from collapse; as a farmer, he sees how much of his West African food has journeyed across the Atlantic to make the island’s unique cuisine; as musician he becomes part of the spirit that puts the island on the world stage, out of all proportion to its size. This is a novel of ideas – how much is accidental in the world? How much can be planned? It has much to say about the impact of colonialism on the fragile ecology of the island – but it is the pursuit of love and the tragedy of death, the interweaving of moments of harmony and moments of conflict and the motives of vividly drawn characters that are the drivers of this sometimes zany narrative. And there is always the texture of the language to enjoy in a book whose prose is as flowing, elegant and heartfelt as the music that moves freely back and forth across the seas between Africa and the Caribbean.

Para Onde Furam os Vivos by Eduardo Quive

Publisher: Alcance Editores Moçambique
Date: April 4, 2023
Genre: Poetry
Language: Portuguese
Where to find it: Click here.

Eduardo Quive

Eduardo Quive
Eduardo Quive

Eduardo Quive is a writer, journalist, producer and cultural programmer. As a journalist, he was editor of the weekly newspapers Dossiers & Factos and Debate – arts and culture newspaper, and also worked on television as a content producer and presenter. He is currently editor of Literatas – arts and letters magazine, and collaborates with the press in Mozambique and abroad. He is a producer and programmer of art and literature festivals and guides creative writing workshops. Founding member of the Kuphaluxa Literary Movement and co-founder of Catalogus – portal for Mozambican authors. Write poetry and prose. His poetry is published in anthologies in Mozambique, Brazil, and Italy. He is the author of the book Lágrimas da Vida Sorrisos da Morte (Literatas, 2012); Co-author of the book Brasil & África-Poetic Ties (Editora Letras, 2014); co-organizer of the collections Contos e Crônicas para ler em casa vol. I and Vol. II (Literates, 2020); co-organizer of the book O Abismo à Pés – 25 Portuguese-speaking writers answer about the imminence of the end of the world (Literatas, 2020).

Para Onde Furam os Vivos

Para Onde Furam os Vivos by Eduardo Quive

Para Onde Furam os Vivos (English: Where did the living go) , by Eduardo Quive, is a poetry book that shares several types of discursive record, the lyrical, the confessional, the language of a diary, or the notation of a reporter or journalist, and also a tenuous narrative line , sometimes creating scenarios for a cinematographic or photographic environment.

Mes deux papas by Éric Mukendi

Publisher: Gallimard
Date: March 9, 2023
Genre: Fiction
Language: French
Where to find it: Click here., Amazon.

Éric Mukendi

Éric Mukendi
Éric Mukendi

Eric Mukendi, a French teacher in Rouen, who arrived in France at the age of 7 from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Mes deux papas

Mes deux papas by Éric Mukendi

“It’s better two pain au chocolat instead of one, or two ice creams for example, one chocolate and another vanilla without having to choose, two is better than one, okay, but having two dads , it’s not something that I would have asked the good Lord if I had to ask for something twice. For example, I will never know what it does to Idrissa and Aminata when they go to school and that we ask them if they are from the same family, that they say yes and then that when the report cards are handed out, there are two mums who complain and only one dad. I’d be too ashamed. Sometimes I’m ashamed for Idrissa because it’s obvious that the teachers don’t find it normal, this old black man who arrives with women who could be his daughters and with whom he has children who are the same age. To believe that he conceives them in threesomes. I see that it shocks you a fourteen year old kid who talks about threesomes but I know the internet, too.” Soaked in humor , tenderness and irony, here is an extraordinary slice of our lives in black and white. And in vogue this fabulous first novel!…

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts By Soraya Palmer

Publisher: Penguin Random House
Date: March 28, 2023
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Click here.

Soraya Palmer

Soraya Palmer
Soraya Palmer

Soraya Palmer was born and raised in Flatbush, Brooklyn, NYC with roots in Trinidad and Jamaica. She works in Youth Organizing and holds a BA in Africana Studies an M.F.A. in Fiction. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, and Calyx.

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts By Soraya Palmer

 “Mothers never die. Children love to resurrect us in they stories.”

Folktales and spirits animate this lively and unforgettable coming-of-age tale of two Jamaican-Trinidadian sisters in Brooklyn grappling with their mother’s illness, their father’s infidelity, and the truth of their family’s past

Sisters Zora and Sasha Porter are drifting apart. Bearing witness to their father’s violence and their mother’s worsening illness, an unsettled Zora escapes into her journal, dreaming of being a writer, while Sasha discovers sex and chest binding, spending more time with her new girlfriend than at home.

But the sisters, like their parents, must come together to answer to something more ancient and powerful than they know—and reckon with a family secret buried in the past. A tale told from the perspective of a mischievous narrator, featuring the Rolling Calf who haunts butchers, Mama Dglo who lives in the ocean, a vain tiger, and an outsmarted snake, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts is set in a world as alive and unpredictable as Helen Oyeyemi’s.

Telling of the love between sisters who don’t always see eye to eye, this extraordinary debut novel is a celebration of the power of stories, asking, What happens to us when our stories are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?

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