ISSA FEB 2021 STACK
It’s the 2nd month of the year, and already a number of incredible books have already been published. So many great books, so little time! February will be seeing some more INCREDIBLE literature published by diverse authors.
Here are some of the ones that caught our eye; (To shop any of the above titles, click here)
Kololo Hill by Neema Shah
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Brown Baby - Nikesh Shukla
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Raceless by Georgina Lawton
Uncoupling by Lorraine Brown
Kololo Hill - 18th February 2021
When you're left with nothing but your secrets, how do you start again? Uganda 1972. A devastating decree is issued: all Ugandan Asians must leave the country in ninety days. They must take only what they can carry, give up their money and never return. For Asha and Pran, married a matter of months, it means abandoning the family business that Pran has worked so hard to save. For his mother, Jaya, it means saying goodbye to the house that has been her home for decades. But violence is escalating in Kampala, and people are disappearing. Will they all make it to safety in Britain and will they be given refuge if they do?
And all the while, a terrible secret about the expulsion hangs over them, threatening to tear the family apart.
From the green hilltops of Kampala to the terraced houses of London, Neema Shah's extraordinarily moving debut Kololo Hill explores what it means to leave your home behind, what it takes to start again, and the lengths some will go to protect their loved ones.
(To shop any of the above titles, click here)
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson - 4th February 2021
Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.
At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it.
(To shop any of the above titles, click here)
Brown Baby by Nikesh Shukla - 4th February 2021
How do you find hope and even joy in a world that is racist, sexist, and facing a climate crisis? How do you prepare your children for it, but also fill them with all the boundlessness and eccentricity that they deserve and that life has to offer?
In Brown Baby, Nikesh Shukla explores themes of racism, feminism, parenting, and our shifting ideas of home. This memoir, by turns heartwrenching, hilariously funny, and intensely relatable, is dedicated to the author's two young daughters and serves as an act of remembrance to the grandmother they never had a chance to meet. Through love, grief, food, and fatherhood, Shukla shows how it's possible to believe in hope.
(To shop any of the above titles, click here)
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood - 16th February 2021
A furiously original novel, alive and unstable' Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror. A woman known for her viral social media posts travels the world speaking to her adoring fans, her entire existence overwhelmed by the internet - or what she terms 'the portal'. Are we in hell? the people of the portal ask themselves. Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?
Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: 'Something has gone wrong,' and 'How soon can you get here?' As real-life and its stakes collide with the increasing absurdity of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.
(To shop any of the above titles, click here)
Raceless by Georgina Lawton - 18th February 2021
'Ideas from our parents form the backbone to our identities, the bedrock to personal truths that we recite and remember like prayers from Church or poems from school. But they condition us in more powerful ways than lessons from any book or religion ever could. Now the tale had been destroyed. So what did that mean about who I thought I was?'
In Georgina Lawton's childhood home, her Blackness was never acknowledged; the obvious fact of her brown skin, ignored by her white parents. Over time, secrets and a complex family story became accepted as truth and Georgina found herself complicit in the erasure of her racial identity.
It was only when her beloved father died that the truth began to emerge. Fleeing the shattered pieces of her family life and the comfortable, suburban home she grew up in, at age 22 Georgina went in search of answers - embarking on a journey that took her around the world, to the DNA testing industry, and to countless others, whose identities have been questioned, denied or erased.
(To shop any of the above titles, click here)
Uncoupling by Lorraine Brown - 18th February 2021
Hannah and Si are in love and on the same track - that is, until their train divides on the way to a wedding. The next morning, Hannah wakes up in Paris and realises that her boyfriend (and her ticket) are 300 miles away in Amsterdam!
But then Hannah meets Leo on the station platform, and he's everything Si isn't. Spending the day with him in Paris forces Hannah to question how well she really knows herself - and whether, sometimes, you need to go in the wrong direction to find everything you've been looking for...
(To shop any of the above titles, click here)
Any of the above catch your eye? Shop our Feb 2021 stack here
