The Incomers by Moira McPartlin My rating: 5 of 5 stars 4.5 stars I bought this book partly because I was so attracted to the beautiful manga style cover art centred on a gorgeously drawn black woman’s face. While her necklace looks African to me, her rakish curls of hair, sceptical eyebrow and thick gold… Continue reading Against the Party Line
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez My rating: 4 of 5 stars I think I’ve decided not to re-read this, so I can’t review it properly because I’ve forgotten my thoughts. I’m glad this was brought to my attention by the year of reading women selection because it’s an amazing story and… Continue reading La mariposas
Granada by Radwa Ashour My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is my second Ashour and takes its place beside The Woman from Tantoura as one of my favourite books. Once again, the author deals with tantalising and difficult material with poetic and thematic subtlety and affectionate warmth for her characters. It opens with a… Continue reading Dreams & Nightmares of Al-Andalus
The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer My rating: 4 of 5 stars 3.5 stars New millennium, new rhythm. I think that’s what’s going on here. South Africans walking to the beat of hyphenated identities, flow and stutter, bounce and glide, at the mercy of beauty and ruthlessness… Gordimer’s ear to the ground heard this as it… Continue reading The Pickup: a few unfinished thoughts
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read my first Octavia Butler novel, Dawn, late last year, and late in my life! Reading it I was like oh no black women authored speculative fiction, where have you been all my life? (right there on the shelf being read by… Continue reading Rewriting fate
The Abandoned Baobab: The Autobiography of a Senegalese Woman by Ken Bugul My rating: 4 of 5 stars Contrast. Between the village in Senegal and the Belgian city. Between Bugul’s means of conveyance and my mode of decoding. It is always hot there. It is always cold there, she says of the village, a line… Continue reading Nervously ‘I’
We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by bell hooks My rating: 5 of 5 stars Hooks explains why she felt the need to write this book, rather than leaving it to Black men to speak for themselves on the topic: Many of the individual black men working in the field of ending male violence… Continue reading bell hooks on black men and masculinity
When you have emptied our calabashes Into your porcelain bowls overflowing the surplus spilling and seeping into foreign soil when you have cleaved the heads of our young and engraved upon the soft papyrus there an erasure of our past having built edifices to your lies filled them with so many bad books and distorts… Continue reading When you have Emptied our Calabashes
Quicksand by Nella Larsen My rating: 5 of 5 stars Helga Crane seems awkward and capricious, as introverts (like me) often do, at odds with a world better shaped to the needs of extroverts. But Helga’s struggle to find a place for herself, she feels, is caused by her heritage, visible and invisible. Biracial, black,… Continue reading Sinking Feelings
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie My rating: 5 of 5 stars War cuts across class, gender, race. The privileged Igbo woman. The Igbo houseboy from the village. The white Englishman in love with Igbo art. Three voices for this story, three hearts cut by the grief of a war from which… Continue reading Love in Biafra
(I am because you are) 