Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It:

Open Water is an astonishing love story – delicate, tender, sensual, intimate.

It is written in the second person – an unknown narrator addressing the male protagonist, a young Black man, throughout as ‘you’. Whoever this narrator is, they are privy to the man’s deepest and most private thoughts and emotions. As readers, we find ourselves at once deep inside the protagonist’s head, and yet at one critical remove from it – a clever, challenging and at times unsettling balancing act.

The man meets the women he falls in love with at a party, when she is still in a relationship with a friend of his. He is a photographer, she a dancer. The connection is immediate and intense, and though neither of them makes a move to act upon it, the electricity between them is enough to fracture her previous relationship.

For a long time, they remain as intimate friends, though the direction of travel of their relationship feels inevitable. Nelson’s descriptions of the slow graceful process of surrendering to love are exquisite:

You’re like a pair of jazz musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians, but your love manifests in the music. Sometimes, your head tucked into her neck, you can feel her heartbeat thudding like a kick drum. Your smiles a grand piano, the glint in her eye like the twinkle of hands caressing ivory keys.

Yet overshadowing everything is the ugly beat of racism, threatening to warp something inside him.

We are all hurting, you said. We are all trying to love, to breathe, and find ourselves stopped by that which is out of our control. We find ourselves unseen. We find ourselves. Unheard. We find ourselves mislabelled. We who are loud and angry, we who are bold and brash. We who are Black. We find ourselves not saying it how it is. We find ourselves scared. We find ourselves suppressed, you said.

Could this ugliness destroy what is beautiful between them? Even though she knows its poison as well has he does? And if so, is there any way back?

This is prose, but wall between it and poetry is gossamer thin. Each word has been weighed carefully and chosen for its impact on the ear and mind of the reader. You don’t read about this relationship: you live it.

Winner of the 2021 Costa First Novel Award.  

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Who’s Loving You? (ed: Sareeta Domingo); Love after Love by Ingrid Persaud; The Gift of Looking Closely by Al Brookes

Avoid If You Dislike: Second Person Narratives

Perfect Accompaniment: 'Brenda' by Isaiah Rashad

Genre: Literary Fiction, Romance

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The Family Tree by Sairish Hussain

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought Of It:

Spanning almost thirty years, The Family Tree is a portrait of a family riven by a mother’s death in childbirth, by the pressures on Muslim family life of 9/11 and its aftermath, but most of all by a vicious assault that leaves a close friend lying in a coma.

It begins with the father, Amjad, newly bereaved and struggling to cope, trying to comfort his frantically wailing baby girl and his lost and heart-sore son. The profound tenderness in that opening scene will be tested to breaking point in the years that follow, but that little family of three will remain at the core of the story.

It’s a story of love within a family, how it can fracture and what is needed to repair it. And of how, following trauma, friendships can shatter and reform along lines that were previously unimaginable. It encompasses both private grief and public tragedy, and examines what can happen when those two things collide and exert unendurable pressure on a young person on the threshold of life.

Through the story runs image of the shawl that belonged to Neelam, the mother who died giving birth to her daughter. It’s a teal blue pashmina with the mustard-coloured blossom tree stretching along its full length, with birds that flit from branch to branch. In Amjad’s mind, the tree becomes their family tree, and when the children are little, he teaches them to identify the birds with each member of the family. It becomes the golden thread through which the family can find itself again.

This is a novel wide in scope and straightforward in its narrative style. An impressive debut.

Shortlisted for the 2020 Costa First Novel Award.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Dear Infidel by Tamim Sadikali

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories involving homelessness, drug addiction and serious assault

Perfect Accompaniment: Home-made roti

Genre: Contemporary 

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The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

"No doubt you think this will be one of those slave histories, all sugared over with misery and despair? But who’d want to read one of those?" 

Frannie Langton was born a slave in Jamaica, educated for his own amusement by her master, then brought to London and given by to another man. Now she is in Newgate gaol, accused of murdering that man and his wife. And she is writing her confessions. But is she really the ‘Mulatta Murderess’?

Sara Collins darkly gothic historical novel explores, among other things, the way the institution of slavery distorted every human relationship, even that between mother and child. It exposes the ugliness of the roots of 'race science' and the vile length to which some were prepared to go to disprove the humanity of black people.

While still a young child, Frannie has been compelled to act as assistant to one such ‘scientist’. Being complicit in his experiments allows her a bare edge of privilege over the other slaves, and has given her a kind of Stockholm syndrome, so much so that she is outraged when she is given away to his erstwhile colleague, Benham.

But Benham has a wife, a troubled woman in some ways as trapped in her life as Frannie herself. Their relationship – passionate, sensual but bent out of shape as much by their power-imbalance as by Madam’s opium addiction – will lead Frannie to her cell in Newgate.

As Catherine Johnson’s Freedom did for young readers, The Confessions of Frannie Langton reclaims the long history of Black people in England. It shows up the hypocrisy of some, at least, of the anti-slavers, as well as those, like Benham, who imagine it is possible to ‘reform’ the institution.

"What no one will admit about the anti-slavers is that they’ve got a slaver’s appetite for misery, even if they want to do different things with it."

Even though her life hangs in the balance, Frannie refuses to dish up suffering to satisfy the appetites of the public, or to use her thrall either to opium or to her erstwhile slavemaster as convenient excuse. Whatever she has or has not done, Frannie will own it.

Collins’ writing is rich with period detail without being weighed down by it.From the slave plantation – called, with the bleakest of irony, Paradise – to the Benhams’ London town house, to the city’s brothels and boxing rings, each time and place is vividly evoked.

A stunning debut that is an unsurprising winner of the Costa First Novel Award.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Washington Black by Esi Edugyan; The Long Song by Andrea Levy; Beloved by Toni Morrison; Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

Avoid If You Dislike: Gothic Flavoured Historical Fiction

Perfect Accompaniment: Raisin cake, golden and sweet with sugar

Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

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