A Very Jacaranda Autumn in Paperback Releases
This autumn, we're showing big love to the paperback with Tippa Irie's Stick To My Roots: A Music Memoir and Alford Gardner's Finding Home: A Windrush Story, two 2023 non fiction favourites coming to you for the first time in paperback, and Colours of Hatred, the pacy, political thriller from award-winning Nigerian writer, Obinna Udenwe.
Choose your paperback...
Stick To My Roots: A Music Memoir | 19.09.2024
"a legend, a teacher and a pioneer of reggae dancehall music in the UK and worldwide" - Julian Marley
Spanning an impressive 40+ year career in the music industry, Stick To My Roots charts Tippa Irie's incredible story - from his trailblazing beginnings in Saxon Sound International to the Grammy Award-nominated "Hey Mama" with the Black Eyed Peas.
Titled after his 2010 hit single, this autobiography moves from the first sign of talent in Irie as a child in Brixton, South London and family members encouraging him to enter local talent competitions, to making his first record, connecting to his roots home in Jamaica as well as the wider reggae legacy across the Caribbean and the African continent and becoming the powerhouse and Reggae-scene legend he is now.
It is a memoir full of dreams, music and hope, but also the deep traumas and tribulations that Tippa experienced throughout his life.
Colours of Hatred | 26.09.2024
When in service of money and power, is love a deadly game of an eye for an eye?
In this politically charged thriller, Leona, an internationally renowned Sudanese-Nigerian model was in her youth asked by her father to marry Akinola, a billionaire and son of his rival and kill him afterwards, to avenge her mother.
Now on her deathbed, Leona is driven to confess her sins and find absolution.
But how does one begin to do that? For as dastardly as the sin, it was an act of love, loyalty, disobedience, and perceived fairness.
Set against a background of real events, Colours of Hatred is a complex web of plots detailing how one woman moved from childhood through the fire and anvil of love, loss, longing, lust, and duty.... to become a woman whose life stands for mpre than another person's bitter machinations.
Finding Home: A Windrush Memoir | 03.10.2024
RAF Veteran and Prince's Trust Awardee, Alford Dalrymple Gardner is one of the few living passengers to have travelled on the Empire Windrush. Now published in paperback, Finding Home is his stirring life story.
On 22nd June 1948, the Empire Windrush sailed from Kingston, Jamaica, to harbour at Tilbury Docks. It carried 1,027 passengers and two stowaways, and more than two thirds of them were West Indies nationals. Alford Dalrymple Gardner was among them.
Alford's story traverses both the uplifting highs and intolerant lows that West Indian migrants of his generation encountered upon travelling to Britain to forge out a life. From joining the British military during World War II to being forcibly deported back to Jamaica once it was won-only to come back to the UK when the government decided it needed him again-Alford witnessed milestone events of the 20th century that shaped the country he still lives in today.
In the context of a supposedly 'post-Imperial' Britain where the lives of West Indian migrants hang precariously on the whims of the Home Office, Alford's heartening testimony is a celebration of those who endured hardships so that generations to come could call this place home.
Today, Alford's portrait is a part of the Royal Collection Trust as commissioned by King Charles III in 2023, and he is a regular face and voice on the likes of The BBC, Channel 4, Sky News and more as his story continues to embody for all, the spirit of joyous resilience.
Each book is available to buy on our website, your local bookshop and in eBook format so you can enjoy just the way you like it.