February 4, 2023
This week, we highlight some of the very excellent new books on the horizon and welcome the beginning of Black History Month with an incisive, comedic novel about doomsday preparations in present-day Brooklyn. We also have a collection of essays about being Black and female that is destined to be required reading. Rounding out this week’s picks are an historical novel that takes place on a racially integrated island off the coast of Maine in the 1900s, and stories from the Caribbean, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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The Survivalists
By Kashana Cauley
Published by Catapult
Meet Aretha—a single, seriously ambitious Black corporate lawyer living in Brooklyn who is fed up with dating: “If she had to live with something that shat, at least a dog wouldn’t say anything dumb.” When she becomes involved with entrepreneur Aaron, who along with his roommates, is preparing for the end of the world, she begins to recalibrate her life, rethinking her hopes and dreams. Cauley is an established comedy writer (The Daily Show with Trevor Noah) who knows how to grab and keep your attention, with a timely plot and hilarious observations, in this fun-packed fiction that interrogates race, ambition, friendship and even guns.
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Black and Female
By Tsitsi Dangarembga
Published by Graywolf Press
This Mournable Body, the author’s most recent novel, was set in her native Zimbabwe and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In Dangarembga’s new essay collection, she describes herself as an “existential refugee.” In “Writing While Black and Female,” she explains, “Those who, like me, were wounded by the hubris of whiteness no longer say, ‘I hurt,’ and self-medicate in self-destructive ways…Today we say, ‘You hurt me,’ words that point…to the possibility of…transforming oneself into someone the one who hurts can no longer dismember.” This is intellectually stimulating, powerful writing about racism, sexual abuse of women, and class struggle.
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This Other Eden
By Paul Harding
Published by W. W. Norton
Harding (Tinkers, which won the Pulitzer in 2010) is one of the most erudite writers out there and his novel, 10 years in the making, has echoes of the Bible and Shakespeare. The dramatic opening flood (“churning in its saltwater guts”) sets in motion a vivid story inspired by historical events. Apple (based on the real Malaga) Island was a racially integrated fishing community in the 1900s composed of people evacuated from the Maine mainland. Their quiet life is overturned when a white man comes to expel them to develop the property at the time of the first eugenics congress. This is an insightful lens through which to view American segregation.
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River Sing Me Home
By Eleanor Shearer
Published by Berkley Books
This moving novel could be called ‘Motherlove.’ You will hold your breath as Rachel, a ‘freed’ slave in 1830s Barbados finds that freedom is in name only. Despite the odds, she valiantly flees the plantation, where she was told she must work another six years, to search for the children who were taken from her and sold. Her brutal journey will take her into a postcolonial Caribbean as she desperately looks for her five beloved children. Shearer is a descendant of the Windrush generation—those who fled the Caribbean for the U.K. between 1948 and 1971. Honoring her heritage, her novel is both cinematic and quietly meditative.
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A Spell of Good Things
By Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
Published by Knopf
Adébáyọ̀ (Stay with Me) is joining the ranks with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (with whom she studied) of the fine writers coming out of Nigeria today. Her second novel addresses contemporary Lagos exposing the fine line between the haves and have nots, and the lucky and the unlucky. She reveals the disparities among her ensemble of beautifully drawn characters (from a well-to-do doctor with political ties who is trepidatious about the man she is marrying, to a smart young boy whose family cannot afford his education and is reduced to begging) as they hurtle toward a dangerous climax. This book has a mighty energy that will engross and impress you.
