How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones
Jones tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears.
Through a series of vignettes, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence-into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers.
Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another-and to one another-as we fight to become ourselves.
–
An award-winning poet, Jones has developed a style that’s as beautiful as it is powerful-a voice that’s by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze. How We Fight for Our Lives is a one-of-a-kind memoir and a book that cements Saeed Jones as an essential writer for our time.
WINNER OF THE 2020 STONEWALL BOOK AWARD-ISRAEL FISHMAN NONFICTION AWARD
Find How We Fight For Our Lives& other Saeed Jones treasures here
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The unmissable debut novel by the critically acclaimed author of Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power – a richly imagined and compulsively page-turning journey to freedom.
Hiram Walker is a man with a secret, and a war to win. A war for the right to life, to family, to freedom.
Born into bondage on a Virginia plantation, he is also born gifted with a mysterious power that he won’t discover until he is almost a man, when he risks everything for a chance to escape. One fateful decision will carry him away from his makeshift plantation family and into the heart of the underground war on slavery…
Find The Water Dancer here.
The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré | £8.99
Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Debut Book of the Year 2021
Shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2020
All you have are your words.
Meet Adunni, a teenage girl born into a rural Nigerian village.
Aged fourteen, she is a commodity, a wife, a servant.
She is also smart, funny, curious, with a spirit and joy infectious to those around her.
And despite her situation going from bad to worse, she has a plan to escape she will find her ‘louding voice’ and get her education, so that she can speak up for herself – and all the girls who came before her.
As she turns enemies into friends and superiors into aides, Adunni will take you with her on a heart-breaking but inspiring journey from a small village to the wealthy enclaves of Lagos, and show you that no matter the situation, there is always some joy to be found.
Find The Girl with the Louding Voicehere.
Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans | £12.99
From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity.
With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself—and us—home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America—and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman.
Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering Black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.
Find Black Girl, Call Home here.
Black Sundayby Tola Rotimi Abraham | £8.99
A fierce and fresh debut novel, set over the course of two decades in Nigeria, about sisterhood, fate and female resistance
Twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike are enjoying a relatively comfortable life in Lagos in 1996. Then their mother loses her job due to political strife and their father gambles away their home, and the siblings are thrust into the reluctant care of their traditional Yoruba grandmother.
Inseparable while they had their parents to care for them, the twins’ paths diverge once the household shatters: one embracing modernity as the years pass, the other consumed by religion.
Written with astonishing intimacy and wry attention to the fickleness of fate, Black Sunday delves into the chaotic heart of family life. In the process, it tells a tale of grace in the midst of daily oppression, and of how two women carve their own distinct paths of resistance.
Find Black Sundayhere.
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi | £8.99
As a child Gifty would ask her parents to tell the story of their journey from Ghana to Alabama, seeking escape in myths of heroism and romance. When her father and brother succumb to the hard reality of immigrant life in the American South, their family of four becomes two – and the life Gifty dreamed of slips away.
Years later, desperate to understand the opioid addiction that destroyed her brother’s life, she turns to science for answers. But when her mother comes to stay, Gifty soon learns that the roots of their tangled traumas reach farther than she ever thought. Tracing her family’s story through continents and generations will take her deep into the dark heart of modern America.
Find Transcendent Kingdom here.
