BOOKS


Category Spotlight Discover: March


Category Spotlight


Discover: March T


A preview of new titles published in March


Early springtime sees the release of a diverse range of titles, including an array of works by African and Japanese writers


his month, the first 10 titles in Apollo’s African Writers series— the new home for 100 titles from


Natasha Onwuemezi @tashaonwuemezi


the historic Heinemann African Writers series—will be published, including books from Nobel Prize-winning authors Wole Soyinka and Naguib Mahfouz as well as the previously banned A Walk in the Night by Alex La Guma and Ripples in the Pool by Rebeka Njau. The series features authors from 26 countries, with more titles to come throughout the year. Picador is republishing the back catalogue of the American author Percival Everet, who was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. You’ll find five of his titles


in this preview. Further highlights include works from Japanese authors: Kazushige Abe’s Mysterious Setting (Pushkin), Kyo Maclear’s Unearthing (ONE) and Sonya Tanaka’s Cannibals (Honford Star). Clara Kumagai’s Catfish Rolling (Zephyr) blends magic realism with Japanese myth in a story about grief, memory and an earthquake that shook a nation. Elsewhere, we have the first story collec- tion by science-fiction author Ted Chiang, which was the basis for the Oscar-winning film “Arrival”, an essay collection delving into infertilit edited by Kat Brown, and an exploration into AI and its impact on our behaviour by Madhumita Murgia.


Category highlights


Memoir


Kyo Maclear Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love


and Family Secrets ONE, 7th, £18.99, HB, 9781911590958


Three months after Maclear’s father dies, she gets the result of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, desper- ately seeking answers from her ailing mother.. A gripping and emotion- ally eloquent memoir about a family secret and the transformative possibilities of growing plants, featuring the author’s illustrations.


TheBookseller.com


Poetry


Sanah Ahsan I cannot be good


until you say it Bloomsbury, 14th,£9.99, PB, 9781526665867


Debut


The début collection


by the winner of the Outspoken Performance Poetry Prize is a tender meditation on queerness and Islam. Intricately weaving Quranic verse, psychol- ogy, and the hip-hop soundtrack of their childhood, Ahsan’s poems explore unruly emotional and physical landscapes, Whiteness, islamophobia, homo- phobia, intergenera- tional suffering and the politics of therapeutic processes.


Fiction Katy Massey


All Us Sinners Sphere, 7th, £16.99, HB, 9781408729694


Debut


Set in a brothel in Leeds in


1977, a period when the author’s own single mother strived to make a living for her family in the city’s sex industry, while the Yorkshire Ripper terrorised its streets, the atmosphere of fear is the backdrop of this fictional story. Tough but tender brothel-keeper Maureen is unexpectedly drawn into investigating the killing of a friend’s son. Massey’s début explores issues of race, sex work, class, and trust in the police.


Fiction


Susie Luo Paper Names Verve Books, 21st, £9.99, PB, 9780857308559


Debut


Set across New York and


China over the course of three decades, this title tackles racism, multigenerational trauma and the reality of the American dream in the 21st century. Paper Names explores what it means to be American from three different perspectives, when an attempted mugging in New York irrevocably alters the lives of three people: Chinese-born Tony, his daughter Tammy, and Oliver, a charming white lawyer.


Fiction


Shinya Tanaka Cannibals Honford Star, 29th, £13.99, PB, 9781915829092


During the summer of 1988, in a forgot- ten neighbourhood known as the riverside, 17-year-old Shinogaki Toma is entangled in a desperate struggle against what he believes to be his fate to become his sadistic father. Toma’s downward spiral into depression and instability becomes increasingly intense. Tanaka’s Akutagawa Prize-winning novel has sold more than 200,000 copies in Japan and was adapted into a movie by Cannes Film Festival- winner Shinji Aoyama.


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