Here are 7 More New African Literature Releases in 2017
The first 7 months of the year has already seen the release of some exciting new books, including Ayobami Adebayo's Bailey's shortlisted Stay With Me, Lesley Nneka Arimah's short story collection What it Means When It Falls From the Sky and Abdulai Sila's The Ultimate Tragedy - the first novel ever to be translated into English from Guinea Bissau.
We are now more than half way into 2017, and I wanted to update my new releases in 2017 list (here and here), as there are even more new releases. There have also been a lot of cover reveals, including Tochi Onyebuchi's Nigerian-influenced YA fantasy Beasts Made of Night, and the UK and US covers of Nikhil Singh's Taty Went West. The UK edition (middle image) is out in October, and the US edition is out Jan 2018.
Well,
here are 7 more to add to your list - one was published earlier in the year, a
couple are already out and the rest are soon to come.
March
In direct narrative terms the poems in this collection relate
to the horrors of the civil war that ousted the brutal tyranny of Idi Amin in
Uganda, a war of liberation that brought its own barbarous atrocities. In
political terms the poems chart the impact of imperialism and neo-colonialism
that lay behind those traumas in the life of the nation. In personal terms, the
poems are framed between the contrary pulls of attachment and flight, exile and
longing. At their heart is an unwavering curiosity about how people behave in
extreme situations, and what this reveals about our common human capacities to
indulge grandiose visions, betray them, dissemble, seek revenge and kill. There
is no presumption of innocence. There may be flight, but there is no standing
aside. The narrator can dream (but is it a dream?) of a "dead man/who has
been stung by the invisible bee of my bullet"
June
Translating as
‘initiation’, kumukanda is the name given to the rites a young boy
from the Luvale tribe must pass through before he is considered a man. The
poems of Kayo Chingonyi’s remarkable debut explore this passage: between two
worlds, ancestral and contemporary; between the living and the dead; between
the gulf of who he is and how he is perceived.
Underpinned
by a love of music, language and literature, here is a powerful exploration of
race, identity and masculinity, celebrating what it means to be British and not
British, all at once.
July
Best mates Karl and Abu are both 17 and live near Kings
Cross. Its 2011 and racial tensions are set to explode across London. Abu is
infatuated with gorgeous classmate Nalini but dares not speak to her.
Meanwhile, Karl is the target of the local "wannabe" thugs just for
being different. When Karl finds out his father lives in Nigeria, he decides
that Port Harcourt is the best place to escape the sound and fury of London, and
connect with a Dad he's never known.
Rejected on arrival, Karl befriends Nakale, an activist who
wants to expose the ecocide in the Niger Delta to the world, and falls headlong
for his feisty cousin Janoma. Meanwhile, the murder of Mark Duggan triggers a
full-scale riot in London. Abu finds himself in its midst, leading to a
near-tragedy that forces Karl to race back home.
When We
Speak of Nothing launches a powerful new voice onto the literary
stage. The fluid prose, peppered with contemporary slang, captures what it
means to be young, black and queer in London. If grime music were a novel, it
would be this.
From an author of rare, haunting power, a stunning novel
about a young African-American woman coming of age—a deeply felt meditation on
race, sex, family, and country
Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor—someone, or something, to love.
In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi’s life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood.
Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor—someone, or something, to love.
In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi’s life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood.
Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a
stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss. An elegiac
distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman’s
understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What
We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction.
 |
| UK cover: Not Final |
Evening Primrose by Kopana Matlwa
(UK edition)
With urgency and tenderness Evening
Primrose explores issues of race, gender and the medical profession
through the eyes of a junior doctor.
When Masechaba finally achieves her
childhood dream of becoming a doctor, her ambition is tested as she faces the
stark reality of South Africa's public healthcare system.
As she leaves her deeply religious mother and
makes friends with the politically-minded Nyasha, Masechaba's eyes are opened
to the rising xenophobic tension that carries echoes of apartheid.
Battling her inner demons, she must decide if
she should take a stand to help her best friend, even it comes at a high
personal cost.
September
The Reactive by Masande Ntshanga (UK edition)
October
For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember,
she's been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born,
identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.
Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she
also knows that as long as she survives she'll be hunted. No matter how well
she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a
way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl
who looks just like her?
…
and of course there are already a number of exciting titles that will be out in
2018. There’s Nnedi Okorafor’s The Night Masquerade (part 3 in
Okorafor’s award winning Binti trilogy) and part 1 of Tomi Adeyemi’s Childrenof Blood and Bones trilogy which
sees 17-year-old Zélie Adebola who has one chance to bring magic back to land of Orïsha.
There’s also Petina Gappah’s ‘historical novel about the journey undertaken by the African companions of the Scottish explorer David Livingstone to carry his body from the African interior to the coast, so that he could be buried in his own land’, as well as Akwaeke Emezi's debut Freshwater - 'an autobiographical novel that explores the metaphysics of identity and mental health - centreing on a young Nigerian woman as she struggles to reconcile the proliferation of multiple selves within her'. Diana Evans Ordinary People will also be published, and it's described as ‘aportrait of London and a study of modern relationships and identity’, and
Emmanuel Iduma’s A Stranger’s Pose, which is ‘part memoir, and part travelogue and even part flash fiction’.
I
was also at Africa Utopia last weekend at London South Bank Centre where Nadifa
Mohamed briefly mentioned working on her third novel, which will focus on the
Somali population in Wales (if I remember correctly), and Sulaiman Addonia
announced he also had finished writing his second novel – which took him 9
years to write. His first novel, The
Consequences of Love (which is on my ever growing to-read list) was
shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2009.
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