Published in 2002 in Arabic and in 2007 by Fourth Estate in English, this novel evokes the lives of a large cast of characters who either live, work or are associated with an apartment block in Cairo. In its sense of community it evokes for me… Liverpool! There is that street in Liverpool where the following could happen too: ‘The distance between Baehler Passage, where Zaki Bey el Dessouki lives, and his office in the Yacoubian Building is not more than a hundred meters, but it takes him an hour to cover it each morning as he is obliged to greet his friends on the street.’ I picked it up after flicking through it because it read well and I wanted to explore lots of things going on in the novel more fully: how to juggle a large cast of characters using the free indirect speech technique; the uses of omniscience; plot patterning (Chapter one returns in last chapter);characterisation by the switching from one consciousness to another, within a chapter or within a page. The biggest writing riddle for me was how the author moves in and out of past and present tense so gracefully in such an epic novel. I never quite got the pattern, though the slide in and out never bothered me so there must be a pattern. By the second part of the novel, this ‘hang’ of multiple characters starts to gain momentum and firm up into a more mobile plot – certain characters emerge as more important and the trials of one couple starts to become central. It ends in marriage so therefore on an upbeat. Along the way, the author does the main gay relationship in the novel well and the big age gap relationships astutely; the rags to riches story is smartly developed. I found the political episodes a little flat (eg the Muslim Brotherhood speeches) or predictable, though I am not sure how much that is because I did not agree with the politics of the novel.  All in all, The Yakoubian Building is a tour de force of how to write this kind of ‘multiple points of view’ narrative. Miscellaneous further musings: Is the reverence of things French only the characters’ – ie a demonstration of how colonialism remains in the minds of the characters/ inhabitants? Or is it also an opinion of the author?  The author shows the power-politics hyphen convincingly. There is no great heroic character who is young and with agency. A society apparently controlled by the older generation and by...

A rumbustious story of the life of formidable lampi fish seller and sex worker, Seduce, set on a mythical Caribbean island. Written primarily in a West Indian patois, Reynolds’ 180 page debut novel is composed of five movements, with each movement containing on average eight sections. The story begins at the side of Seduce’s coffin and ends with her burial. In between we learn of her life through the voices of family, friends, enemies, lovers, clients and associates, as well as hearing Seduce herself – both telling her own story and commenting on the stories of her that others tell. The novel achieves a kaleidoscopic effect as each scene shifts the narrative back and forth along the timeline and between the tangible world and the spirit world, all the while keeping as its central focus the life and times of the eponymous, irreducible main character. Reynolds is a supremely talented portraitist with a fine prose style and a playwright’s gift for scene-building. Scenes switch smartly in mood from raucous to poetic to acerbic to tender. The whole is imbued with a sense of pathos as the harsh current social conditions and the fraught history of the island reveal themselves. The distinctive language used almost throughout the novel may be hard to understand at first for those not familiar with anglophone Caribbean patois, but we rapidly gain fluency and the novelty of the language immerses us in the unique consciousnesses of the various characters. They tell of the roads they have travelled, the rivers they have crossed. It feels as if every human emotion that exists finds a place within this novel’s twin worlds: rapture, despair, pride, fear, envy, piety and malevolence all jostle for a perch. The text can be screamingly funny. Hyacinth, a mortal enemy of Seduce looks at her corpse and mutters: “Me no know why di coffin not ‘Y’ shape, mek me tell you. Too much cocky track in she!” At times it is deeply moving. When Seduce describes how she rescued a girl trapped and repeatedly raped on a sailing ship, she tells: “Me hole out me han and she tek it. Lord, she was like a little bird. Her head movin quickly, lookin fi danger… she must’ve come from di lan where dem eyes is di shape of flowers dat not yet open, even under di dirt an tears me could see dat she was beautiful’ Complex relationships are woven with a natural narrative ease. Mikey, Seduce’s some time partner, describes his fascination with the mercurial Seduce: “An odda day we sittin an di beach, just sittin, an I look across at her an me feel betrayed. Her face was so beautiful, so calm an peaceful. Even in moments when me could mek her cry out, mek her laugh, mek her angry, me neva mek her look like that. So me reach ova an stroke she face.” For all the humour and love, the predominant tone is one of struggle – for survival in a harsh landscape  –  making the novel a harrowing read in parts. Yet the urgency of the prose and its lyrical beauty insulates you from the pain and ensures you keep turning the page. Seduce summarises her own life succinctly and aptly: “Me was never a gyal. Went from baby to woman in a blink of an eye.” A tour de force of storytelling, Seduce is a novel to be savoured. More please! Seduce, Peepal Tree 2013...

  A white man is found dead and semi naked in a red light district. A black suspect was seen running away with the dead man’s trousers. Somewhere else, a card appears in an urban convent window requesting “fertile womens, lovin God, inquire within”. Meanwhile, a vexed blind man sits on the subway with his pistol ready. Yes, it’s just another day in Chester Himes’ Harlem. Blind Man With A Pistol was the last novel featuring Harlem cops, Gravedigger Jones & Coffin Ed that Chester Himes wrote. It went out in 1969. Enough time for Himes to have witnessed the USA Vietnam War debacle, the Black Power Movement faltering, the Cold War at sub zero and the Middle East convulsing. The plot? Well, it’s like trying to describe your own intestines – by the time out straighten it all out I’d have killed my (and your) interest in the book. Let’s just say Himes doesn’t bother so much with the immaculate plotting of say, The Crazy Kill. Don’t worry about plot. It will all kinda sort itself out as you read on. The novel is set primarily outdoors. Himes has pretty much abandoned ‘going into character’: having you get to know with any intimacy any characters. Instead he looks at public space, public interactions and the burning conflagrations along the race divide. There is a lot that is wrong with the novel. Some of Himes’ attitudes, the creaky plot, the buffoonery. You start to feel maybe Himes’ legendary powers are waning. Yet the ending is a glorious redemption. I racked my brains trying to think of an author who can write crowd scenes as well as Himes. Dickens? No. Dostoyevsky? No. Armistead Maupin? No. Pasternak? Almost. Tolstoy? Maybe, but without Himes’ verve. I finished the book and went to bed laughing. And for the next half hour I was smiling under the sheets –actual wet-eye smiling – as I remembered the last two chapters. Himes. In his own words, he was one crazy motherfucker. And he didn’t half write.   Extract: “They believed in Black Power. They’d give it a trial anyway. Everything else had failed. What did they have to lose? And they might win. Who knew? The whale swallowed Jonah. Moses split the Red Sea. Christ rose from the dead. Lincoln freed the slaves. Hitler killed six million Jews. The Africans had got to rule – in some parts of Africa, anyway. The Americans and the Russians have shot the moon. Some joker has made a plastic heart. Anything is possible.”...

Hybridity wins, uncertainty prevails, the plural is the new normal: the new black* generation of three jobs, three zeros of debt, relatives from here, there and another where, speakers of this language, that code, coming from and going to a multiplicity have begun to set down their poems. Effervescence, zeal and invention are here. The voices are more tangential, reflective, a zig-zagging individuality displacing the more uniform rhetorical black poetry legacy of the 80s and 90s, the latter’s dub and steady four line rhyming poem after Maya Angelou, its avowedly public, avowedly black audience. And the Caribbean/Pakistani/Indian inflected poet personas have been superseded as the second generation becomes the third, becomes the fourth and absorbs and re-sounds the super-diversity that has created the multi-polar, multi-referential, profusely tagged, diverse communities of today. The espousal of rational ideology is almost vanished: whether Black Lives Matter or black unemployment or discriminatory structures of public institutions, the mute is on, the vol turned down low. The apprehension of discrimination, that anxiety and insecurity – that troubled black psyche – is still there of course, it sits at the bottom of the stomach, nibbling, but mostly it features obliquely in these poets’ work, you have to hush and listen carefully to its nuance. They are more concerned, at least on the surface of their poems, with habitus – with the day to day events of their lives. (There is an irony in this of course: the very reason for the assembling of the ten under the rubric of diversity is due to the discriminatory practices of the publishing/literature world that has blocked progress for such writers in the past. But irony is one of the key flavours of this age.) All ten of this cohort have been mentored by an impressive bunch of outstanding poets and, in the book, their mentors take a page to introduce their mentees. There are probably plenty of other stories in the mentor-mentee relationships – which pairing went smoothly, which proved difficult, how the mentors felt at the end of it all, the dramas, the tears, the late night phone calls (no doubt banned under the contracts but…?). All that is speculation. What isn’t in doubt is what a fine result has been achieved. Each poet has an approx ten page section in the book. Let me attempt to describe their poems, as succinctly as I can, in the order each poet appears in the book. To each I’ve added tags, for fun. Warsan Shire Tags: Moving, vernacular, ordinary language, loose structural Some great poems that show both a bold, inventive approach to structure and unusual settings or subjects eg a poem on family grief called ‘Backwards’ in which time runs backwards ; ‘Men in cars’ on first sex, both forced and consensual. The poems’ immediacy spills out off the page, often through the use of present tense dialogue: ‘spits on his fingers’ ‘make the blood run back up my nose’ and vernacular language: ‘fuck if I know’. Shire is casual in form, searing in content: portraits of friends and relations are sharp and ring true; there is humour, a bleakness, and a dash of crazy. ‘Everyone laughs. They think I’m joking.’ Eileen Pun Tags: funk, channelling, veering, offbeat We visit strange places, fairy tale settings in these poems, places inhabited by offbeat people: the truffle hunter and his dog is one such poem – a celebration of idiosyncrasy, and single minded passion even as it thwarts the hunter’s human relationships. The poems have a funk at times and a strong narrative bent, the larger pieces border on flash fiction, and pick up the complex emotional interplay of the seemingly mundane. Then in the ‘bird’ poems, in the ‘Whitethroat’ chit chat acid poems, the page becomes a channelling typewriter, scattering bird words. It reminds me of the ‘drunken monkey’ kung fu technique –the seemingly erratic and chaotic that yet has effect in surprising ways. The sum is a joyous energy that slips here and there into zen like mode. This is all I am. Adam Lowe Tags: Rigour, charge, party, restless, wrestling A formal rigour to the (generally 3 line verse) structure of these poems holds the ring as the poems sing & dance of nightclub life, protest demos, the fizz of new relationships, the seduction of the devil, a reworking of a Saphho poem; there is a touch of Anthony Burgess in the Polari* language of ‘Vada That’; these shimmering lines are a burst of bling, in a classical shell. For all that joy, there is a restlessness within the verse, a wrestling with borders and a lust for connection. Smart poems, they exult and glow. Sarah Howe Tags: Haunting, morph, brushstroke, inheritance The poetry here all ostensibly takes its cues from Chinese text/s and references. In ‘Tame’ there is tragedy in folk tale, the harshness of rural life, the despair of an unloved child who pines for her mother, that child’s transformation into a goose and a death that brings unification with the mother though in the most gruesome of ways (something consistent with the folk tales’ early iterations). The most chilling line: he ‘flogged her with the usual branch’. The poetry is in plain language, the text is allegorical in feel. Other poems look at the natural morphs and resonances of Chinese language which allow it to connect in one small brushstroke such unlikely bedfellows as...