How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Much of Nagamatsu’s debut novel was completed before 2020, and its themes will strike readers with their prescience. Set in the near-future, a team of scientists in Siberia discover a mummified pre-historic female corpse they name “Annie”, which holds a disease that sets off a catastrophic pandemic named “the Arctic Plague”. Nagamatsu focuses on the human side of the crisis, leaping forward 6,000 years to reveal a society that has commercialised death, and the long-reaching legacy of past decisions. Expansive and genre-defying, it is told through discrete stories that slowly coalesce. “Like a Polaroid photograph, How High We Go in the Dark takes time to show its true colours. When they finally appear, the effect is all the more dazzling,” writes the Guardian. It is, writes the New York Times, “a book of sorrow for the destruction we’re bringing on ourselves. Yet the novel reminds us there’s still hope in human connections, despite our sadness.” (RL)
Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood
Now in the seventh decade of her remarkable literary career, Margaret Atwood has written her third collection of essays that, says the i newspaper, “brims with enthusiasm and verve”. Broadly looking at events of the past two decades, the range of subjects is wide – from censorship and Obama, to #MeToo and zombies. And there are insights into her own craft and the function of fiction. As the i puts it: “Atwood always makes the idea of big questions a little more digestible. You find yourself asking: what can fiction do? What can we do, generally?” The essays are full of a “droll, deadpan humour and an instinct for self-deprecation” says the Guardian. “Atwood remains frank, honest and good company.” (LB)
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire
This is Warsan Shire’s long-awaited, first full-length poetry collection, after two pamphlets, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011) and Her Blue Body (2015). It arrives nearly six years after the Somali-British poet shot to world-wide fame collaborating with Beyoncé on the latter’s ground-breaking visual albums, Lemonade (2016) and Black is King (2020). The poems in Bless the Daughter… draw from Shire’s own experiences, bringing to vivid life black women’s lives, motherhood and migration. “Shire’s strikingly beautiful imagery leverages the specificity of her own womanhood, love life, tussles with mental health, grief, family history, and stories from the Somali diaspora, to make them reverberate universally,” writes Dfiza Benson in The Telegraph. (RL)
Leave a Reply