06Feb/17
Extract from The Memory of Love
Extract from The Memory of Love This extract comes from pp. 151–152 of Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love. Feel free to highlight any portion of the text to annotate the passageRead More…
06Feb/17
Extract from The Emperor’s Babe
Extract from The Emperor’s Babe This extract comes from p. 3 of Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (Penguin edition, 2002). The text is fully annotatable: highlight any portion to add your own thoughts.Read More…
16Jan/17
Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe
The Emperor’s Babe, Bernardine Evaristo’s comic verse-epic or novel-in-verse, told in erratically un-rhyming couplets, pays heed to Britain’s long history of cultural mixing and colonization on home ground. Evaristo tells the feistyRead More…
16Jan/17
Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love
With striking confidence, Aminatta Forna’s second novel, The Memory of Love (2010), explores the complex long-term effects of war and betrayal. The narrative moves between times and perspectives to delve into theRead More…
16Jan/17
Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy
Jama, a Somali boy, walks and walks, ‘sharpening his spirit on the knife-edge of solitude’. The long journey that becomes his life begins in Aden, Yemen, and threads through Hargeisa, Somaliland, war-tornRead More…
16Jan/17
Daljit Nagra’s Look We Have Coming to Dover!
The poems in Daljit Nagra’s celebrated debut collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover! (2007), are based on Nagra’s experiences as the son of Punjabi parents who came from India to Britain. Combining playfulness, pathosRead More…
16Jan/17
D-Empress Dianne Regisford: ‘Hersto-rhetoric? Na so today!!!’
In a series of seven sculptures created by abstract expressionist artiste D-Empress Dianne Regisford, the multi-sensory performance installation, ‘Hersto-rhetoric? Na so today!!!’ is at once an incantation, a lament and an invocationRead More…
16Jan/17
Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone
Kamila Shamsie’s audacious and affecting A God in Every Stone ranges across continents and histories, from the fifth-century reign of Persian King Darius, through to the suffrage movement in pre-1914 England, fromRead More…
16Jan/17
Zadie Smith’s NW
NW (2012), Zadie Smith’s fourth novel, documents the lives and experiences of four people who come from the same area in north-west London: Leah Hanwell, Felix Cooper, Natalie (née Keisha) Blake andRead More…