Author: Parker Bilal
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Country: UK - Sudan
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Known for his novels about the Sudanese community and Diaspora, British-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub – writing under the pseudonym Parker Bilal – has added a lease of new life to the African detective thriller with his crime fiction debut The Golden Scales.
Makana is an exiled Sudanese former police inspector who lives on a houseboat in Cairo. When Adil Romario, Egypt’s biggest football star, disappears, Hanafi – a business tycoon and owner of Romario’s club – hires Makana to track down the missing striker.
Meanwhile, Liz Markham is back in Cairo looking for her daughter who disappeared 17 years earlier. Former Russian military agent Vronsky says he knows nothing about either disappearance. Can Makana and his unwanted ally Sami, a tenacious journalist, find Romario? And is he even missing?
The Golden Scales is a great introduction to Cairo and to African crime fiction, to be followed up with a good serving of novels by Moussa Konaté and Deon Meyer.
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Words: Alex Macbeth
Title: Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
Author: Reni Eddo-Lodge
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Country: United Kingdom
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The book title "Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race" is just as provocative as its cover design. To white people appears almost hidden on the cover, creating a visual representation of white people's blindness to structural racism.
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is also the title of a blog post Eddo-Lodge wrote back in February of 2014. Her post was an act of self-preservation, self-care and an act of personal warfare.
In that post, Eddo-Lodge wasn't trying to remove white people from the conversation or take them on a guilt trip; rather, she was simply saying that she'd had enough.
This book is an extension of Eddo-Lodge’s viral post, where she openly expresses her frustrations when talking to white people who fail to acknowledge their privilege, or those who display a disconnect when she shares a subjective experience as a black woman in Britain or those who become defensive, often prepare counter-arguments and are quick to pinpoint flaws in her experience when she speaks about race.
Let’s be clear, in this book Eddo-Lodge isn't trying to guilt trip white people, rather, all she’s is saying is that she is at the end of her tether.
In this collection of seven essays, Eddo-Lodge delves into topics like structural racism, class and feminism. The opening essay takes the reader on a crash course in black British history, where she explores the UK’s brutal and extensive involvement in the slave trade.
This is a must read for anybody who can read. It’s the boldness and straight talk which makes this book memorable as it leaves a heart-wrenching trail of case histories, statistical and anecdotal evidence, personal stories and opinion about the manifestation of overt and covert racism, addressing racism as a systematic problem and calling out those who run the system to do something about it. This book instigates a candid and much needed dialogue across a spectrum of races.
