Harare Review of Books

Here’s what’s on my reading list for (roughly) the second half of the year—including links to some books I’ve read and written about already, and with publisher blurbs in italics where I haven’t yet.

First, the list of ARCs I have to hand (thanks to all of the publishers, and to Edelweiss Plus and NetGalley!)

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After the Funeral and Other Stories x Tessa Hadley, out July 11 from Knopf.

Laughter in the Dark x Yasmine El Rashidi, out July 11 from Columbia Global Reports.

I Love My People x Kim Singleton, out July 11 from Broadleaf Books.

This is a love letter to Black people in the form of poetry and lovely images, featuring Black icons and ordinary people. It’s a very simple and quick read, and can be enjoyed by teens and young adults.

Butt Or Face x Kari Lavelle, out July 11 from Sourcebooks Explore.

MAINTENANT 17: a Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art, edited x Peter Carlaftes & Kat Georges, out July 18 from Three Rooms Press.

Vanishing Maps x Cristina García, out July 18 from Knopf.

From the acclaimed author of Dreaming in Cuban, a follow-up novel that tracks four generations of the del Pino family against the tumultuous backdrops of Cuba, the U.S., Germany, and Russia in the new millennium. Set twenty years after the events in Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina García’s new novel is an epic tale of family, devotion, and the timeless search for home.

The Thing at 52 x Ross Montgomery, out July 18 from Frances Lincoln Children’s Books.

Small Worlds x Caleb Azumah Nelson, out July 18 from Grove Atlantic.

No One Prayed Over Their Graves x Khaled Khalifa, out July 18 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

From a National Book Award finalist, the story of two close friends whose lives are irrevocably changed when they survive the flood that devastates their village. Khaled Khalifa weaves a sweeping tale of life and death in the hubbub of Aleppine society at the turn of the twentieth century. No One Prayed Over Their Graves is a portrait of a people on the verge of great change: from the provincial village to the burgeoning modernity of the city, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews live and work together, united in their love for Aleppo and their dreams for the future.

Learn to Draw in 5 Weeks x KRITZELPIXEL, out July 18 from Zeitgeist.

Day-by-Day, Isabel B. Zimmerman (aka KritzelPixel), brings you a fun, beginner-friendly program to quickly grasp core drawing techniques. Each week, you’ll develop a new skill, incorporating principles such as light, depth, and perspective into your evolving work.

Jackal Jackal x Tobi Ogundiran, out July 18 from Undertow.

From the Shirley Jackson award nominated author comes a highly anticipated debut collection of stories full of magic and wonder and breathtaking imagination! In “The Lady of the Yellow-Painted Library” a hapless salesman flees the otherworldly librarian hell-bent on retrieving her lost library book; “The Tale of Jaja and Canti” sees Ogundiran riffing off of Pinnichio, but this wooden boy doesn’t seek to become real, but wanting to be loved, journeys the world in search of his mother—an ancient and powerful entity who is best not sought out. “The Goatkeeper’s Harvest” contains echoes of Lovecraft, where a young mother living on a farm finds that goats have broken into her barn and are devouring all her tubers. As she chases them off with a rake, a woman appears claiming the goats are her children, and that the young woman has killed one of them and must pay the price: a goat for a goat. These and other tales of the dark and fantastic await.

A Practical Guide to Levitation x Jose Eduardo Agualusa, out July 25 from Archipelago.

A luminous collection of dryly humorous stories that revel in the surreal and fantastic, from the pen of José Eduardo Agualusa, winner of the International Dublin Literary Award. Vividly translated into English for the first time by long-time Agualusa collaborator Daniel Hahn, the jewel-like tales gathered in this collection are an exuberant celebration of story-telling in all its various forms. On the sands of Itamaracá, an old fisherman dreams of fish: shad in the morning, when the water’s smooth and silvery, the Atlantic tarpon after it rains, and a jack when the sea goes blue. Elsewhere, Borges sulks away in a plantation of neverending banana tree, and the president of the United States wakes from a coma speaking only Portuguese.

All We Could Have Been and More x Joshua Shaw, out July 29 from Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama.

Tartt First Fiction Award! Zombie ant fungus, self-conscious crash test dummies—you surely understand the black humor focus of this collection. The author recently commented, “A lot of the stuff I’m publishing these days in philosophy involves defenses of pessimism and misanthropy. I credit the last few elections for inspiring this new research line.” 

Little Whale x Anna Brett, out Aug. 1 from words & pictures.

Kariba x Daniel Clarke, James Clarke & Daniel Snaddon, out Aug. 1 from Catalyst Press.

Island Man x Joanne Skerrett, out Aug. 1 from Red Hen Press.

Island Man is a story about a father and son who struggle to forge a relationship out of generations of family trauma, secrets, and loss. A grieving Hector Peterson and his estranged father Winston Telemacque arrive on the lush island of Dominica in 2017 to spread his mother’s ashes when Hurricane Maria strikes. Amid the devastation, the fragile peace between father and son is tested as long-buried family secrets at the heart of Hector’s identity are unearthed. Hector faces down his failed marriage, shipwrecked career, and his own failures as a father, while Winston, after three decades of striving as an immigrant in Boston, seeks to reclaim the losses from a painful childhood and the bloody betrayal by his one true love. In Island Man , the ruins of past and present are reconciled and shattered generational bonds are restored.

Level Six x William Ledbetter, out Aug. 7 from Interstellar Flight Press.

Fifteen years after warring artificial intelligences nearly destroyed Earth, Abby, the daughter of Killday hero Leah Gibson, finds an artifact from that struggle, upsetting a delicate balance of power and dragging her into the middle of a new fight for humanity’s survival.One AI faction is working with humanity to repair a biosphere teetering on the edge of collapse, while another faction cares only about elevating itself to a higher plane of intelligence and will destroy anyone who gets in the way. As the only humans still not controlled by AIs race to build huge orbital habitats in space, a more secretive organization grows in the shadows and idolizes the man who triggered the nano-replicator attacks that nearly destroyed the world. They, too, believe the only way to stop the AIs is to annihilate everything. In Nebula Award winner William Ledbetter’s Level Six, one woman has the power to save humanity – if she can survive long enough to use it.

Creative Wanderlust x Kasia Avery, out Aug. 8 from Quarry Books.

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon x Wole Talabi, out Aug. 8 from Astra Publishing House.

The debut fantasy novel from an award-winning Nigerian author A mythic tale of disgruntled gods, revenge, and a heist across two worlds. Shigidi is a disgruntled and demotivated nightmare god in the Orisha spirit company, reluctantly answering prayers of his few remaining believers to maintain his existence long enough to find his next drink. When he meets Nneoma, a sort-of succubus with a long and secretive past, everything changes for him. Together, they attempt to break free of his obligations and the restrictions that have bound him to his godhood and navigate the parameters of their new relationship in the shadow of her past. But the elder gods that run the Orisha spirit company have other plans for Shigidi, and they are not all aligned—or good.

Las Madres x Esmeralda Santiago, out Aug. 8 from Knopf.

From the award-winning, best-selling author of When I Was Puerto Rican, a powerful novel of family, race, faith, sex, and disaster that moves between Puerto Rico and the Bronx, revealing the lives and loves of five women and the secret that binds them together.

Thin Skin x Jenn Shapland, out Aug. 15 from Pantheon.

From a National Book Award finalist and a powerful literary mind, an incisive new work examining capitalism’s toxic creep into the land, our bodies, and our thinking. Weaving together historical research, interviews, and her everyday life in New Mexico, Shapland probes the lines between self and work, human and animal, need and desire. She traces the legacies of nuclear weapons development on Native land, unable to let go of her search for contamination until it bleeds out into her own family’s medical history.

The Great Transition x Nick Fuller Googins, out Aug. 15 from Atria Books.

Emi Vargas, whose parents helped save the world, is tired of being told how lucky she is to have been born after the climate crisis. But following the public assassination of a dozen climate criminals, Emi’s mother, Kristina, disappears as a possible suspect, and Emi’s illusions of utopia are shattered. A determined Emi and her father, Larch, journey from their home in Nuuk, Greenland to New York City, now a lightly populated storm-surge outpost built from the ruins of the former metropolis. But they aren’t the only ones looking for Kristina.

South x Babak Lakghomi, out Sept. 12 from Dundurn.

Cold, Black and Infinite x Todd Keisling, out Sept. 1 from Cemetery Dance Publications.

Down here in the dark lies a vast and twisted landscape where the wicked, wistful, and profane coalesce. This is where the lonely and lost face their demons, where anxious paranoias are made manifest, and where mundane evil wears a human face. For readers, the sixteen stories found within Cold, Black, & Infinite serve as a harrowing glimpse into the nightmarish imagination of Todd Keisling, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of Devil’s Creek and Scanlines.

The Stone Breakers x Emmanuel Dongala, out Sept. 5 from Schaffner Press.

Set in an imagined contemporary African country, this gripping novel tells from a unique second person point-of-view of the uprising of a group of women stone crushers at a gravel pit, who rise up against their corporate bosses to demand higher wages for their labor–– a grueling process of breaking rocks down to gravel-size bits to be used as road surfacing for the expansion of the country’s airport. What begins as a village protest escalates to a state-wide rebellion that confronts the corrupt leadership and challenges the status quo set by the government and the mining corporations.

Princess Diana x Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, out Sept. 5 from Frances Lincoln Children’s Books.

This little book tells us a little about the life of Princess Diana, and includes some of the struggles she went through (bulimia, Charles’s affair, his envy of her public acceptance) in a child-appropriate way.

Painting Cats x Terry Runyan, out Sept. 12 from Leaping Hare Press.

Following on from the hit Painting Happiness, quirky and super-popular Instagram artist Terry Runyan presents a playful follow-up in her same charming, unique style – Painting Cats.

Jeffrey Loves Blue x Loretta Garbutt, out Sept. 12 from Owlkids.

This is a really lovely little book about sharing and about emotions, and finding a healthy balance (although Jeffrey doesn’t seem to quite manage this by the end of the book). The illustrations (and graphic style) are wonderful.

Digging Stars: A Novel x Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, out Sept. 12 from W. W. Norton & Company.

With admission to The Program, Rosa fulfills her dream to continue her father’s research on Bantu geometries and Indigenous astronomies. Yet since his death during her childhood, she has been plagued by anxiety attacks that she dubs “The Terrors”—and by unresolved questions about her father’s life. Who is his mysterious friend Mr. C? Who was her father, really? Full of philosophical provocation and gorgeous writing about space, Digging Stars is a brilliantly original reflection on meritocracy and the narrow notions of success that alienate us from the cosmos—a gravity-defying novel both about unlimited aspiration and the importance of being grounded.

You Were Watching from the Sand x Juliana Lamy, out Sept. 19 from Red Hen Press.

A stylistically and conceptually daring collection that winds from fantastical horror to mischievous domestic realism and always keeps in its sharp, compassionate view the material, spiritual, and emotional lives of Haitian people.

The Never Wars x David Pedreira, out Sept. 19 from Blackstone Publishing.

In The Never Wars—a mind-bending mix of Interstellar and The Expanse—a group of disgraced Special Forces are given one chance to redeem themselves. The question is whether they’ll survive long enough for it to matter.

Mercy and Grace x Anoop Judge, out Sept. 19 from Lake Union Publishing.

From India to America, a woman’s search for family, home, and self becomes a journey of secrets and forgiveness in a powerful novel by the author of No Ordinary Thursday.

50 Years of Ms. x edited by Katherine Spillar and the editors of Ms., out Sept. 19 from Knopf.

A celebration of Ms.—the most startling, most audacious, most norm-breaking of the magazine’s groundbreaking pieces on women, men, politics (sexual and otherwise), marriage, family, education, work, motherhood, and reproductive rights, as well as the best of the magazine’s fiction, poetry, and letters. Here are essays, profiles, conversations with and features by: Alice Walker, Cynthia Enloe, Pauli Murray, Nancy Pelosi, bell hooks, Billie Jean King, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Alison Bechdel, Brittney Cooper, and Joy Harjo, as well as fiction and poetry by Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Joyce Carol Oates, Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove, and Sharon Olds, among many others.

Avenues by Train x Farai Mudzingwa, out Sept. 26 from Cassava Republic.

Jedza, a down-and-out electrician, moves to Harare in the hopes that he will escape the darkness and superstitions of the small town. But living in the shadowy restless atmosphere of the Avenues with its mysterious pools of water rising under musasa trees, he is tormented by the disappearance of his sister and their early encounters with ancestral spirits, the shapeshifting power of the njuzu and a vengeful ngozi. To move forward, he must stop running away and confront the trauma of his past.

Skeptics in the Pub: Cholera x Mark Crislip, out Oct. 1 from Bitingduck Press.

What would the present day look like if the purveyors of patent medicines had managed to suppress the germ theory? Conflicting models of disease and cure, ranging from balancing humors to homeopathy, form the basis of powerful guilds that control public discourse and stifle discovery. Cholera breaks out in 2017 Portland, Oregon, and all of the medical guilds rush to own a piece of the cure. But an unlikely team of skeptics have heard rumors from Europe that disease is caused by animalcules invisible to the naked eye. With a smuggled microscope and a gradually evolving hypothesis, the skeptics take histories, sample, and examine whatever they can. When the guild leaders find out, the skeptics must race against time and the vagaries of the cholera bacillus itself to keep the outbreak from decimating the city.

The 30th Candle x Angela Makholwa (revised edition), out Oct. 2 from Amazon Publishing UK.

Linda, Dikeledi, Nolwazi and Sade spent their twenties pursuing fast-paced careers and love lives in vibrant Johannesburg. Now, with their thirties just around the corner, they know the one thing they can count on is each other, but it turns out even the firmest friendships have secrets…

Standing Heavy x Gauz, out Oct. 3 from Biblioasis.

Amidst the political bickering of the inhabitants of the Residence for Students from Côte d’Ivoire and the ever-changing landscape of French immigration policy, Ferdinand, Ossiri and Kassoum, two generations of Ivoirians, attempt to make their way as undocumented workers, taking shifts as security at a flour mill. Sharply satirical, political and poignant, Standing Heavy is a searingly witty deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist consumption, an unprecedented and unforgettable account of everything that passes under a security guard’s gaze. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories (LOA 373), out Oct. 3 from Library of America.

The essential novels and stories gathered in this definitive Library of America edition make a case for Russ not only as an astonishing writer of speculative fiction, but, in the words of Samuel Delany, “one of the finest––and most necessary––writers of American fiction” period.

Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration x Ytasha Womack, out Oct. 3 from Becker & Mayer.

Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration charts the compelling people and times that contributed to the comic’s evolution, from the 1960s to today.

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind x Molly McGhee, out Oct. 17 from Astra Publishing House.

Jonathan Abernathy is a loser . . . he’s behind on his debts, he has no prospects, no friends, no ambitions. But when a government loan forgiveness program offers him a literal dream job, he thinks he’s found his big break. If he can appear to be competent at his new job, entering the minds of middle-class workers while they sleep and removing the unsavory detritus of their waking lives from their unconscious, he might have a chance at a new life. As Abernathy finds his footing in this new role, reality and morality begin to warp around him. Soon, the lines between life and work, love and hate, right and wrong, even sleep and consciousness, begin to blur.

Between Dystopias: The Road to Afropantheology x Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki & Joshua Uchenna Omenga, out Oct. 24 from O.D. Ekpeki Presents.

African literary scholars and storytellers have long grappled with the incompatibility of stories of African mysticism with the extant literary labels which seem to erase or dismiss essential aspects of African mysticism in their definitions. Between Dystopias: The Road to Afropantheology takes a stab at this age-old problem that cuts across the continent’s non-monolithic literature rooted in religion and culture.

Motherland x Paula Ramón, out Oct. 31 from Amazon Crossing.

From Venezuelan reporter Paula Ramón comes a powerful memoir about one woman’s complicated relationship with her family as her beloved homeland collapses into ruin.

Skip! x Sarah Burgess, out Nov. 7 from Andrews McMeel Publishing

A pretty good graphic novel for young people, with a non-binary central character.

Remembering Sundays with Grandpa x Lauren H Kerstein, out Nov. 7 from Beaming Books

Written in an age-appropriate way, with stunning illustration, this is a wonderful addition to any family shelf. Highly recommended.

Cross-Stitch x Jazmina Barrera, out Nov. 7 from Two Lines Press.

Jazmina Barrera’s Cross-stitch, in Christina MacSweeney’s taut translation, fuses the cultural history of sewing into a novel that finds its characters hesitant before the specter of adulthood. Mila, Citali, and Dalia–each of them complex, charming, and frustrating–together form a literary tapestry populated by friends and lovers, famous artworks and novels, violence and sexism: they frame the possibility and cruelty of a fraying world in equal measure.

Ndima Ndima x Tsitsi Mapepa, out Nov. 7 from Catalyst Press.

From debut Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Mapepa comes the saga of the four Taha sisters, and the indomitable matriarch who carried her daughters-and her community-through times of drought and violence in their Harare neighborhood.

Orbital x Samantha Harvey, out Dec. 5 from Grove Atlantic.

A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours.

Bonus (out in 2024)

Womb City x Tlotlo Tsamaase, out Jan. 23 from Erewhon.

Set in a cruel futuristic surveillance state where bodies are a government-issued resource, this harrowing story is a twisty, nail-biting commentary on power, monstrosity, and bodily autonomy. In sickeningly evocative prose, Womb City interrogates how patriarchy pits women against each other as unwitting collaborators in their own oppression. In this devastatingly timely debut novel, acclaimed short fiction writer Tlotlo Tsamaase brings a searing intelligence and Botswana’s cultural sensibility to the question: just how far must a woman go to bring the whole system crashing down?

And here’s a list of other books I have my eye on, because 2023 is an embarrassment of riches:

🎉 Well done on getting to the end of this very long post! 🙂