TWENTY YEARS OF THE CAINE PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING

Name: TWENTY YEARS OF THE CAINE PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING
Author: The Caine Prize Committee
ISBN: 978-1-62371-935-7

by The Caine Prize Committee ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 23, 2020

Essential for students of contemporary world literature.

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Best-of gathering of stories from the first two decades of the distinguished literary award devoted to African letters.

In his introduction, Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri writes that the Caine Prize for African Writing “has turned out to be a regenerator of African literature,” a literature that experienced a boom in the immediate post-colonial era but is less well known today. The mostly young writers represented in the collection have, he continues, delivered “tales political, tales harrowing, tales humorous, tales told with vitality and passion and intelligence.” All that is abundantly evident in the editors’ choices. The inaugural piece, by the Egyptian writer Leila Aboulela, mirrors her own life as an immigrant to Scotland. Shadia, a young woman, has fallen behind in a statistics class and asks a Scottish classmate for his notes: “Her ignorance and the impending exams were horrors she wanted to escape,” Aboulela writes, but at the price of striking up a conversation with a man who has a disagreeable ponytail and earring: “The whole of him was pathetic,” she sniffs, and even when the young man, barely comprehensible because of his accent, expresses an interest in Islam (“Ah wouldnae mind travelling to Mecca), she can find no bridge to him. Other pieces speak to the difficulty of crossing cultures, the Nigerian writer Rotimi Babatunde’s “Bombay’s Republic” being a sidelong case in point: A Nigerian soldier finds himself fighting the Japanese in Burma, save that the enemy has vanished because the British have put out the word that “the Africans are coming and that they eat people,” a calumny that demands a response—and finds one when he returns to his homeland. All the stories are excellent, but some are especially memorable, among them Henrietta Rose-Innes’ “Poison,” the 2008 winner, which presciently speaks of an environmental apocalypse that finds the sun over Cape Town “a pink bleached disk, like the moon of a different planet.”

Essential for students of contemporary world literature.

Pub Date: March 23, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-62371-935-7

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Interlink

Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SAG HARBOR

by Colson Whitehead ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 28, 2009

Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.

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Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.

Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.

Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.

Pub Date: April 28, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
CROOK MANIFESTO
by Colson Whitehead

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HARLEM SHUFFLE
by Colson Whitehead

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NICKEL BOYS
by Colson Whitehead

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Laurence Fishburne Producing ‘Sag Harbor’ Series

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ONE DAY IN DECEMBER

by Josie Silver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 16, 2018

Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...

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True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.

On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.

Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.