Month: March 2018

Set across the Gold Coast of Africa and several states in America, Homegoing tells the story of one family as the descendants of two sisters, Effia and Esi, travel back and forth from Ghana. We are given multiple different views of the slave trade and of how heritage, tribe and skin colour affect the choices people make.

It is very easy to fall under the spell of this novel. The storytelling is so compelling and elements of the magical real, that bring ancestral memory to life, weave delightful patterns across so many different lives. Continue reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

I’m delighted to be part of the Blog Tour for the paperback edition of A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf published by Aurum Press and out March 1st. It is one of those books from which you absorb information without realising it. With a forward from Margaret Atwood, it’s a manifesto for female literary friendship.

Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney have been interested in literary female friendship for some time. Not believing that the famous male literary friendships, like Coleridge and Wordsworth or F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, had no female counterparts, A Secret Sisterhood is the culmination of a journey begun in 2014 with Emily and Emma’s Something Rhymed project which celebrates a whole host of different female author pairings. Continue reading A Secret Sisterhood by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney

Asymmetry is a novel of three parts. The first is about a young woman named Alice, an aspiring writer, who has a love affair with the literary giant, Ezra Blazer. It’s set in New York. The second is about an Iraqi-American economist, Amar, held by immigration in Heathrow, London in 2008. The third is the transcript of Ezra Blazer’s appearance on the BBC Radio 4 show ‘Desert Island Discs’. Continue reading Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday