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Book Review: Book Review

Ta-Nehisi Coates
Between the world and me

Between the world and me is a letter from a father to his son about living in the United States of America in a Black man’s body. There are moments in this book where the beauty of Coates’ prose is quite breath-taking, and the whole is sustained by an intellectual rigour that allows it to shine all the better

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Natasha Brown
Assembly

As the title of Natasha Brown’s debut novel suggests, it amounts to a coming-together, an assembling. A Black British woman attends a party for an upper-class white family. This celebration in rural England is the culmination of her inner dilemmas: has she made it or are her actions making her an accomplice to the racism she experiences? At this party, she makes up her mind.

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Abulrazak Gurnah
By the Sea

Since Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, the Zanzibar-born author who lives in the UK has suddenly become known to mainstream audiences. Gurnah’s 2001 novel By the sea is about a dispute between two families that takes place against a backdrop of political change.

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Damon Galgut
The Promise

The Promise marks the third time a South African writer has won the Booker: Galgut joins fellow laureates Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee. The book is executed with a real skill for the craft of writing, and commands respect for the author’s handling of his medium.

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Keri Hulme
The Bone People

The Bone People, set on the South Island of New Zealand, is not always easy, but it’s absolutely worth the trouble. Over the course of reading it my relationship to it kept changing: from liking it, to hating it, to loving it; from wanting to redeem the characters, to loathing them, to taking them for what they were.

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