An almost-blind mother pawns her daughter off to save her. A grieving son must bury his Muslim father in twenty-four hours in the thick of winter. A doctor battles to save her partner from himself. Desperation makes a young businesswoman seek out a spiritual experience. Domi(natrix) wants to give life to her sexual kinks in her repressive household. The weight of the word "slave" is put to the test during a first date in conservative Idaho. Two men kidnap a White man to fight the infiltration of oil companies in Southern Nigeria. A boy escapes his bipolar mother. A young girl tries to spell out the strange words her parents fight with.
These stories are an excavation of what it means to be at the labyrinthine crossroads of desire, ambition, and tradition. The author explores the indelible erasure of personhood and fitting into all the hard places in a bubble where injustice reigns. As such, she fillets the flesh as these characters try to exercise autonomy in their worlds and swim against the uncontrollable tides that mold their lives. The characters are forced out of their stasis, and the collection contemplates whether they ultimately succeed or fail.

Welcome to Boom Town, Atlanta's most infamous Black strip club, where the air is thick with secrets and the stakes are as high as the heels. When Damaris "Charm" Willburn, a new daytime dancer, vanishes without a trace, former headline Lyriq is thrust back into a world she thought she had left behind. Charm's disappearance eerily mirrors that of Lyriq's former partner, Lucky, who also went missing under mysterious circumstances. Both women shared a dangerous connection with Thomas McIntyre, a wealthy white man with far more power than they could imagine.

As Lyriq delves deeper into the mystery, she uncovers a tangled web of deceit, power, and privilege that threatens to consume her. With each revelation, the line between friend and foe blurs, and Lyriq must confront her own past to uncover the truth. But as the secrets of Boom Town unravel, Lyriq faces a harrowing question: can she solve the mystery without losing everything she holds dear?

Boom Town is a masterful blend of suspense and social commentary exploring themes of racial and sexual power dynamics, the invisibility of Black women, and the societal judgements placed on professions deemed "unsavory." In this electrifying thriller, New York Times bestselling author Nic Stone takes you on a heart-pounding journey through Atlanta's dark underbelly.

It has always been Mira, Ma and Ashu. The three of them-as they sing Simon & Garfunkel in Ma's sun-yellow car, watch TV on the sofa and holiday on the mango farm-are bound firmly together. Yet, beneath this tale of proximity, lurks another story-that of a family in hot water.
Nine-year-old Mira, fourteen-year-old Ashu and Ma harbour secrets. All of them confront questions that have no neat answers. Where is Ma's husband, for instance? Who does Ashu pine for? Why is Mira on the alert?
One long, hot summer, the secrets come tumbling out. And the world Ma, Mira and Ashu have cobbled together threatens to give way.
An achingly beautiful novel, Hot Water traces the ways in which the love we feel for one another can both make and wreck us.

The Longe siblings are really botching their parents' American Dream.

Sola Longe, eldest daughter, estranged from the family, is secretly back home in Chicago for the first time in a decade. She's a newly single and recently disgraced influencer trying to quietly put her life back together again. The other three Longe siblings aren't doing much better.

Anjola is in love with her best friend, who just got engaged to someone else; Karen, a college junior and the baby of the family, is grappling with her sexuality and self-image; and Ola, the golden child with a baby of his own on the way, is questioning his marriage and how to raise a Black son in America.

Sola's unexpected return sets them on a crash course towards each other, and when the four siblings find themselves together again at their Nigerian immigrant parents' Thanksgiving table, a decade's worth of secrets and a lifetime of resentments explode to the fore.

In the wreckage of their fateful reunion, each Longe is forced to face the past, take stock of what really matters, and find a way back to one another. Bighearted, hilarious, and poignant, Leave Your Mess at Home is an insightful debut about forgiveness, unconditional love, and becoming who you want to be, asking the question: What do we owe to our families, and what do we owe to ourselves?

An intricately woven tapestry of stories where survival, resilience and self-discovery are passed down through generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family.

Celeste Mohammed's second novel-in-stories, Ever Since We Small, is a family saga which covers a sweeping landscape from the days of the British Raj in India, to multicultural modern Trinidad. Written in a blend of Standard English and several flavours of Trinidad kriol, the book follows the bloodline of a young woman, Jayanti, after her decision to become a girmitiya, an indentured labourer in the Caribbean.

Jayanti's grandson, Lall Gopaul, seeks to escape the rural village where he was born, but becomes seduced and corrupted by urban life. His son, Shiva, is forced to take a child-bride, Salma, but never recovers from the guilt. Heartache follows for their three children - Anand, Nadya and Abby - who must each find a way to accept and yet move past their parents' failed example.

Along the journey of these ten interconnected stories, the alchemy necessary to turn the Gopauls' inheritance of pain into a "generation of gold" requires intervention by the living and dead, the "real" and the mythical, the mundane and the magical, the secular and the sacred.

Winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction.

Shortlisted for the Society of Authors' McKitterick Prize 2022.

Finalist of the 2022 Firecracker Award in Fiction.

Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these and other sunny images are all they know about life in the Caribbean. However, if you want to learn how the locals truly live and experience the dark and often harrowing truths that lurk behind the idyllic imagery of Caribbean culture, then come visit the town of Pleasantview.

Come during election season, and see how one candidate sets out to slaughter endangered turtles - just for fun. Or come on the day the other candidate beats his "outside-woman," so badly she ends up losing their baby. Then come on the night of the political rally, where this grieving woman exacts a very public revenge. Stay a while, and see how this single event has a trajectory far beyond the lives of the immediate actors, with often tragic and heartbreaking consequences.

Written in a remarkable combination of Standard English and Trinidad Creole, Pleasantview showcases the entrenched political, racial, and class dichotomies of life in Trinidad: the generosity (yet cruelty) of the average Trini; the sense of optimism (and yet, despair) which permeates everyday interaction; and the musicality of Caribbean creole (kriol) expression that masks an ingrained and frequently violent patriarchy.

Merging the vibrancy and darkness of recent Caribbean writers such as Ingrid Persaud and Claire Adam with the linguistic experimentation of Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings, Pleasantview is a landmark work in international fiction.

At a time when medicine is a highly sought-after career for Indian women, it is hard to imagine what it was like for the pioneers. The story of how firmly they were bound in fetters of family, caste and society, and how fiercely they fought to escape, needs to be told. In Lady Doctors, Kavitha Rao unearths the extraordinary stories of six women from the 1860s to the 1930s, who defied the idea that they were unfit for medicine by virtue of their gender.

From Anandibai Joshi, who broke caste rules by crossing an ocean, to Rukhmabai Raut, who escaped a child marriage, divorced her husband and studied to be a doctor; from Kadambini Ganguly, who took care of eight
children while she worked, to child widow Haimabati Sen, who overcame poverty and hardship-these women had a profound and lasting impact. And in their forgotten lives lie many lessons for modern women. In truth, the compelling stories of these radical women have been erased from our textbooks and memories, because histories have mostly been written by men, about men. In an immensely readable narrative, and with impeccable research, Lady Doctors rectifies this omission.

Kayo is a young Tokyo housewife and mother. Outwardly, she is no different from other young mothers, but her secret sets her apart. She belongs to a kind of club, which involves luxury, beautiful clothes and accessories.

The club makes it possible for Kayo to escape her tedious life, to become someone else and to embrace a dazzling new world. But it quickly becomes an obsession, a drug, the way to both paradise and hell. Can she find her way out of the dark underworld of debt, lies and prostitution? Or is she doomed to exchange one form of loneliness for another?

A deeply absorbing novel about the "holes" that suddenly appear in women's lives, My Beautiful Shadow is a powerful cautionary tale about consumerism gone mad.