The Desert and the Drum: Mbarek Ould Beyrouk

Translated from French by Rachel McGillPublished by Dedalus, 2018, 170 pages. Original version published in 2015. “There was no moon, no stars. The light has been drained away, the sky left mute. I could distinguish neither colours nor shapes. Dunes and trees had been engulfed by the universe, sucked into its sidereal blackness. … I …

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The Bone Readers: Jacob Ross

Published by Little, Brown and Company / Peepal Tree Press / Sphere, 2016, 264 pages. This is a thoroughly enjoyable whodunit from a Grenadian writer. Michael Digson (“Digger”) is out of work, living on the island of Camaho.[1] He is the illegitimate son (“outside child”) of a maid and her employer, the Commissioner of Police. …

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Real Life: Brandon Taylor

Published by Daunt Books, 2020, 336 pages. “It was a cool evening in late summer, when Wallace, his father dead for several weeks, decided that he would meet his friends at the pier after all.” Wallace is a young, gay, Black man who is four years into a degree in biochemistry at a predominantly white …

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The Ayah and Other Stories: Chanis Fernando-Boisard

Published by Amaryllis, 2017, 132 pages. The short stories in this collection capture the small but seismic shifts in a person’s life: the distraction of a tutor whose wife has left him; the regret of a woman who has walked out of her marriage of 30 years; and a woman realizing that her dream house …

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