Published by Harper Collins / Minotaur Books, 2021, 383 pages. Bombay, 1892. Bacha and Pilloo, two young women, fall to their deaths from the city’s clocktower. The police conclude that it was suicide. Captain James Agnihotri of the British army is recovering in hospital in Bombay after a skirmish in Karachi with the Pathans, a …
Finding Other Ways of Seeing: An Interview with Jacob Ross
Jacob Ross is a Grenadian novelist, playwright, poet and journalist. He now lives in the UK, where he teaches creative writing. His books include Pynter Bender (2008), which, in 2009, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Regional Prize, the Society of Authors Best First Novel, and the Caribbean Review of Books "Book of the Year"; …
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Never Did the Fire: Diamela Eltit
Translated from Spanish by Daniel HahnPublished by Charco Press, 2022, 156 pages. Original version published in 2011. How do you live after you lose everything, when the ideals you devoted your life to are gone, when the people you worked with are dead or no longer around? How do you live in close proximity to …
Pynter Bender: Jacob Ross
Published by Harper Perennial, 2008, 452 pages. “[I]n the villages above the canes people did not die. As long as memory lived they did not. They passed. Leaving always something of themselves behind. John Seegal, their grandfather, had passed most of himself over to Birdie, except for the thieving ways, o’course, which came from a …
Reliving an Old Journey: An Interview with Sofia Samatar
Photo: Jim C. Hines Sofia Samatar is an American author, of Somali and Swiss-German Mennonite descent. Her books include The White Mosque (2022), which won the 2023 Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir (Midland Authors Book Award), and was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. In 2014, her epic fantasy …
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The Burning Bush Women: Cherie Jones
Published by Peepal Tree, 2004, 158 pages. “We live by our hair.“It never lies.“We welcome rain when our plaits undo of their own volition and retreat into themselves. We are pregnant when our hair turns the colour of beetroot and are about to die when it lies still against our scalps and becomes straight and …
A Heart So White: Javier Marías
Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull CostaPublished by Penguin, 1995, 279 pages. Original version published in 1992. “[W]e spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate...identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be told.” “Listening …
Brer Rabbit Retold: Arthur Flowers, illustrated by Jagdish Chitara
Published by Tara Books, 2017, 74 pages. In the late 1800s, Joel Chandler Harris collected stories told by slaves in the southern United States, which he later published. In his version, the stories are told to a little white boy by Uncle Remus, a genial, happy slave, who recounts the adventures of Brer Rabbit, Brer …
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The Anomaly: Hervé Le Tellier
Translated from French by Adriana HunterPublished by Michael Joseph, 2022, 336 pages. Original version published in 2020. March 2021. Air France flight 006 from Paris to New York is nearing JFK airport when it flies into a huge cloud and experiences severe turbulence. After some terrifying moments, the plane emerges and lands. Three months later, …
Telling an Untold Story: Interview with Hafsa Zayyan
Hafsa Zayyan is a Nigerian-Pakistani author and a dispute resolution lawyer working in the City of London. Her book We Are All Birds of Uganda won the MerkyBooks inaugural New Writer’s Prize. She has contributed to Of This Our Country, essays that explore writers' relationships with Nigeria; and Will You Read This Please?, short stories …
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