RaveThe Washington PostExtraordinary ... Through these explorations of specific utopias, Robertson grapples with grand ideas of religion, equality, society and Blackness. The result is an unforgettable history of seemingly impossible yet worthwhile dreams ... Unlike many other sweeping narratives of Black life in America, Robertson’s is concerned with life on the fringes, the less-explored but no less important avenues of survival ...
Robertson expertly dissects the utopian impulse.
Colson Whitehead
RaveThe Washington Post\"With these books, Whitehead has identified deficiencies in the noir genre, and injected beauty and grace into its often too-predictable and clichéd conventions. He saw an invisible post-World War II Harlem epic, a decades-long journey through the most consequential urban Black space in the 20th century, and he willed it into existence ... For all its slapstick fun, this project also has the same gravitas as August Wilson’s seminal 10-play Century Cycle, about Black life in Pittsburgh during the 20th century, a decade-by-decade journey through Black America’s tortured yet breathtaking memory ... These are crime novels, yes; funny and fast-paced. They are also the first two installments of a grand historical epic. Novel writing at its best. Bigger and better, together, than anything Whitehead has written before.\
Caleb Azumah Nelson
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewFamily, grief, Blackness, Frank Ocean, hip-hop, dancing, growing up, breaking up, London, oppression, beef patties, basketball, diasporic trauma — for Caleb Azumah Nelson, it’s all water. The happy glide when it’s easy; the exhaustion of fighting against the current when it’s not. The threat of drowning always looming in the waves ... And in this unforgettable debut, Open Water, all streams are interconnected ... Azumah Nelson’s poetic brilliance, his ability to balance the general and the specific, the ambient and the granular, makes for a salient achievement ... But the big flouted convention, the big risk Azumah Nelson takes that doesn’t always quite pay off, is the second-person narration ... When Azumah Nelson finds his groove, however, we can forgive him all minor annoyances. Whether he’s describing a tense police encounter or lovers intertwined, when he’s great, which is often, his descriptive powers are truly special.
Ingrid Persaud
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... stellar ... [Persaud] has taken the spirit of Walcott’s poem and exploded it into a bighearted prose narrative about an unconventional family, fear, hatred, violence, chasing love, losing it and finding it again just when we need it most ... we smell the food of the Caribbean, sit in the traffic, enjoy the sun, feel the remnants of colonial oppression pressing down on struggling citizens ... Through her tender eye, we see full characters leaning on one another to better understand the world and themselves. We wish our families were more like theirs ... it’s in the second half that the novel’s heart lies, as a secret revealed about the nature of Sunil’s death threatens to crumble this makeshift family ... In lesser hands, the plot of Love After Love could have fallen into melodrama ... But Persaud never loses control ... That said, the writing can at times feel too restrained. Just when we want to hang out a beat longer in the minds of these wonderful characters, Persaud ends the chapter or scene, throws us into another perspective ... Great books about love, like this one, feel like precious and impossible gifts. We should cherish the writers who provide them.
