We wrap up book news for our readers in our regular Book Digest segment with books from Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, Raymond Atrobus, Raphaelle Red, and Bode Abifarin.
The Creation of Half-Broken People by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Publisher: Picador Africa
Date: September 2024
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Wordsworth Books, Pan Macmillan South Africa
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean writer, scholar, and filmmaker. She is a 2022 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. Her debut novel, The Theory of Flight, won the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in 2019. Her second and third novels, The History of Man and The Quality of Mercy, were shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. After almost two decades of living in North America, Ndlovu has returned home to Bulawayo, the City of Kings.
The Creation of Half-Broken People
Showcasing African Gothic at its finest, The Creation of Half-Broken People is the extraordinary tale of a nameless woman plagued by visions. She works for the Good Foundation and its museum filled with artifacts from the family’s exploits in Africa, the Good family members all being descendants of Captain John Good, of King Solomon’s Mines fame.
Our heroine is happy with her association with the Good family, until one day she comes across a group of protestors outside the museum. Instigating the group is an ancient woman, who our heroine knows is not real. She knows too that the secrets of her past have returned. After this encounter, the nameless woman finds herself living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, her life anything but normal as her own intangible inheritance unfolds through the women who inhabit her visions.
Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus
Publisher: Picador; Main Market edition
Date: September 12, 2024
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: Pan Macmillan,
Raymond Antrobus
Raymond Antrobus was born in Hackney, London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of To Sweeten Bitter, The Perseverance, All The Names Given and the children’s picture book Can Bears Ski? A number of his poems were added to the UK’s GCSE syllabus in 2022. The BBC Radio 4 documentary Inventions In Sound, which accompanies All The Names Given, was produced by Falling Tree Productions and won a Best Documentary Award at the 2021 Third Coast International Audio Festival.
Signs, Music
Centred around two lyric poems on imminent fatherhood and the birth of a child, Signs, Music is a book about masculinity, fatherhood, and love. The speaker, looking backwards to his late father and forwards to his new son, prepares to become a parent for the first time. Meditating on the cognitive and emotional dissonances between the ‘hypothetical’ and the ‘real’ of becoming a father, this irreversible transition causes the poet’s ‘lines [to] lead towards my father (again!)’. Charting the ways parenthood disrupts the poet’s sense of self, and how the pain of the past triggers fears of ‘fatherly failure’, Signs, Music is a staggeringly profound collection from one of Britain’s most adept poets writing today.
Adikou by Raphaelle Red
Publisher: Grasset
Date: January 10, 2024
Genre: Fiction, Novel
Language: French
Where to find it: Grasset,
Raphaelle Red
Raphaëlle Red was born in 1997 in Paris and now lives in Berlin. She studied social sciences before preferring literature. For the writing of Adikou, she was notably in residence at the Maison des Artistes in Lomé. Her texts have been published in French (Jef Klak, L’Humanité ), English ( gal-dem, The Funambulist ), and German ( Bella Triste, anthologies Resonanzen and Glückwunsch ). Adikou is her first novel.
Adikou
She can barely pronounce her name, Adikou, which the narrator describes alternately as a lizard and a vulture, a double and a stranger. Her lineage is unclear, her family history troubled. Yet the whole world would like her to give her origins, black or white tick, or fifty-fifty. To agree to settle down. So, one heavy summer day, Adikou can’t stand it any longer. She escapes, takes the road to Togo, the country of the father of whom she knows so little, and the narrator has no choice but to follow her. It is a departure that echoes others: a tumble from the North to the South of the United States during a study trip, an attempt to return to the source with a humanitarian NGO. But this time, she is determined to stay there as long as it takes to find something of herself. A name, a family, a trace, a presence. Or maybe just more breathable air. Lomé will only be the beginning, a damp and dusty foretaste of advances towards ever more shifting areas. Interior territories, which send her back to her insoluble link to mixed race. Family and geographical territories, in search of the origins of a father who fled his country long ago. Historical territories marked by slavery and then colonization. In this initiatory road trip, identity is a matter of interstices, broken mirrors and invented kinships — and literature its territory of affirmation. A first novel in which belonging is expressed in its complexity and through a powerful, carnal language, both harsh and gentle, interior and as if at a distance from an unfindable “self”. A voice that will count.
Adventures of the Boys with the Happy Feet Dance by Bode Abifarin
Publisher: Independent
Date: April 6, 2024
Genre: Children’s Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Amazon, Roving Heights
Bode Abifarin
Bode Abifarin is a C-level executive with over 21 years of experience in the global finance and fintech space. Most recently, she was the COO of Flutterwave, from 2019 to 2024. She has taken courses in speech therapy, behaviour modification and ABA, to help her sons along their journey on the ASD spectrum, freely sharing her knowledge with other young mums at her children’s school and church community groups. Ethan was diagnosed when he turned three. His brother, Nathan, was diagnosed at age four. Post-diagnosis, Bode went into research and put together a team of therapists and facilitators to help the boys develop life skills. Today, Bode’s sons, eight-year-old Nathan and Ethan, are both verbal as they continue the journey to social integration with a community of other mums and children on the spectrum. This journey inspired her to write “The Boys with the Happy Feet Dance”, which chronicles their experience with learning different sporting and everyday living activities.
Adventures of the Boys with the Happy Feet Dance
Embark on an exhilarating journey with Nathan and Ethan as they uncover the enchanting world of music and sports, and embrace the wonders of nature! Watch in awe as Nathan’s fingers dance on the piano keys, filling the air with melodious tunes, while Ethan fearlessly conquers the depths of the swimming pool, dreaming of becoming a champion. Leap with excitement as Ethan masters the art of basketball, and join Nathan on a captivating quest, chasing insects with boundless enthusiasm. Guided by their loving Mum, Dad, and devoted carers, Nathan and Ethan tackle each adventure head-on, transforming challenges into triumphs. With vivid illustrations and thrilling tales, this book is a celebration of laughter, learning, and the spirit of exploration – perfect for families in search of hope and envisioning new possibilities.
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