Translations for books by Meja Mwangi, Resoketswe Manenzhe, Leila Mottley, and Ayanna Lloyd Banwo are available for your reading pleasure.
Kasim, Der Moniker by Meja Mwangi
Book: Kasim, Der Moniker
Original Title: Kasim the Comedian
Author: Meja Mwangi
Translator: Jutta Himmelreich
Publisher: Peter Hammer Verlag
Publishing Date: March 6, 2023
Language: English to German
Where to Find it: Peter Hammer Verlag, Amazon.

Caesar is dead, the charismatic hero of the Kingoo clan. No one who wouldn’t owe much to the former government official! Stubborn and sometimes successful, he has fought against corruption and waste addiction of the elites of Nairobi and paid the school money of poor children with his private fortune. The clan gathers to organize a venerable funeral. Caesar’s daughter Charity once promised her father a Mercedes as a cart, while her money is hardly enough for a coffin. Kasim, who strikes through life as an unsuccessful but undavered comedian and his cousin Salim, a debt lawyer, give everything to fulfill her favorite aunt’s desire Charity. Seven days remain the two to drive a benz…
Randagi by Resoketswe Manenzhe
Book: Randagi
Original Title: Scatterlings
Author: Resoketswe Manenzhe
Translator: Lucia Fochi
Publisher: Solferino
Publishing Date: June 1, 2022
Language: English to Italian
Where to Find it: Solferino
A lyrical, moving novel in the spirit of Transcendent Kingdom and A Burning—and the most awarded debut title in South Africa—that tells the story of a multiracial family when the Immorality Act is passed, revealing the story of one family’s scattered souls in the wake of history.

In 1927, South Africa passes the Immorality Act, prohibiting sexual intercourse between “Europeans” (white people) and “natives” (Black people). Those who break the draconian new law face imprisonment—for men of up to five years; for women, four years.
Abram and his wife Alisa have their share of marital problems, but they also have a comfortable life in South Africa with their two young girls. But then the Act is passed. Alisa is black, and their two children are now evidence of their involvement in a union that has been criminalized by the state. At first, Alisa and Abram question how they’ll be affected by the Act, but then officials start asking questions at the girls’ school, and their estate is catalogued for potential disbursement. Abram is at a loss as to how to protect his young family from the grinding machinery of the law, whose worst discriminations have until now been kept at bay by the family’s economic privilege. And with this, his hesitation, the couple’s bond is tattered.
Alisa, who is Jamaican and the descendant of slaves, was adopted by a wealthy white British couple, who raised her as their child. But as she grew older and realized that the prejudices of British society made no allowance for her, she journeyed to South Africa where she met Abram. In the aftermath of the Immorality Act, she comes to a heartbreaking conclusion based on her past and collective history – and she commits her own devastating act, one that will reverberate through their entire family’s lives.
Intertwining her storytelling with ritual, myth, and the heart-wrenching question of who stays and who leaves, Scatterlings marks the debut of a gifted storyteller who has become a sensation in her native South Africa—and promises to take the Western literary world by storm as well.
When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
Book: When We Were Birds
Original Title: When We Were Birds
Author: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
Translator:
Publisher: Colibri Publishers
Publishing Date: July 28, 2023
Language: English to Bulgarian
Where to Find it: Colibri.

In the old house on a hill, where the city meets the rainforest, Yejide’s mother is dying. She is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: one St Bernard woman in every generation has the power to shepherd the city’s souls into the afterlife. But after years of suffering her mother’s neglect and bitterness, Yejide is looking for a way out.
Raised in the countryside by a devout Rastafarian mother, Darwin has always abided by the religious commandment not to interact with death. He has never been to a funeral, much less seen a dead body. But when the only job he can find is grave digging, he must betray the life his mother built for him in order to provide for them both. Newly shorn of his dreadlocks and his past, and determined to prove himself, Darwin finds himself adrift in a city electric with possibility and danger.
Yejide and Darwin will meet inside the gates of Fidelis, an ancient and sprawling cemetery, where the dead lie uneasy in their graves and a reckoning with fate beckons them both.
Arpenter La Nuit by Leila Mottley
Book: Arpenter La Nuit
Original Title: Nightcrawling
Author: Leila Mottley
Translator: Pauline Loquin
Publisher: Albin Michel
Publishing Date: August 17, 2022
Language: English to French
Where to Find it: Albin Michel, Amazon.

Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison.
But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent—which has more than doubled—and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.
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