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Fangirling over Sherry Thomas
I’m currently ploughing through Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series. It’s a revelation. Beautifully written, clever as all hell and presents a richly drawn 19th century England full of people from all over the British empire.
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Sareeta Domingo is Making Waves
On a bright April day last year, I managed to grab a quick lunch with Sareeta Domingo. She’d whittled an hour out of her fiercely busy schedule to chat with me. To be safe, we ate at the Pret a Manger off London Bridge, a short walk from the Harlequin Mills & Boon office where she works as an editor. When we spoke on...
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Why Publishing Advances Matter
On June 6, 2020, Leatrice “Elle” McKinney, (aka L.L. McKinney, author of A Blade So Black) kicked off a Twitter conversation about publishing advances. Using the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe she asked white authors to share the advances they’d been paid for books so Black authors could get a sense of how their own advances compared. Very quickly a huge disparity between the size of payments...
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Rona Lockdown Reading
What have you been reading to get through the madness of recent weeks?
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Mansa Musa: Glitter and Gold, streaming now…
I spent my Christmas on a train travelling from Canada’s east coast to the west. When I wasn’t gazing out of the huge plate glass windows at mountains, frozen lakes and endless prairie land, I was reading Mansa Musa and the Empire of Mali by P. James Oliver. What an eye opener! Here’s your 60 second guide to the medieval ruler: Kankan Musa was...
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20 Black Books out in 2020
It’s 2020 people! Time to get rid of all the books that have been clogging up your ‘must read’ pile and replace them with shiny new ones. Yes, that is exactly how reading should work. Here are 20 books by Black authors coming out this year. Go forth, read and spread the good news. (Click the book jackets to buy or pre-order) 1. Riot...
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Video Review: My Sister, the Serial Killer
Korede’s gorgeous younger sister Ayoola has a nasty habit of killing her boyfriends once she grows tired of them. Covering up her sister’s crimes is bad enough, but life gets a lot more terrifying when Ayoola takes a liking to Korede’s love interest.
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Where are the joyful Black books?
If you spend any time with me, the conversation will probably veer onto books. From there it’ll take me about 2.5 minutes before I start talking about my desire to see more books by Black authors. The slide from ‘more Black books’ into a lament on the lack of joyful Black books then becomes sure and unstoppable. Why? Because I love joy. I love...
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Can you name 5 BAME tween boy books?
My nephew is 11 and obsessed with Derek Landy’s Skulduggery series. They’re a set of fantasy books about a skeleton detective and are as madcap as they sound. Every time I pop round he has his head stuck in a new book in the sequence. Either Landy has a factory churning these books out or he’s extremely prolific. I keep artfully suggesting to my...
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Homegoing calls out African complicity in slavery and offers healing
Last year I visited Elmina Castle, a slave fortress on the coast of Ghana. It’s a beautiful white-washed building, very similar in style to Cape Coast Castle, the slave fortress where Yaa Gyasi sets key pieces of action in Homegoing. The castles are two of about 40 such structures that were built along the Ghanaian coastline by Europeans. They were trading posts that became...
