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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…