Dialogue Books Post-Traumatic Johnson Chantal V

Can you ever let go of your past? • Cat knows she should be more grateful for her partner James. As a young woman struggling to care for her alcoholic mother, he whisked her away from her council estate home and offered her a taste of middle-class comfort • But twenty years later, the escape he offered has begun to feel stifling and Cat wishes she had made more of her life. She had a place to study at university after finishing sixth form, but her mother was too unwell for Cat to take it. Could she go back now? • At a university open day, Cat finds herself standing before her boyfriend of teenage years, Daniel, now a lecturer. As the spark that drew them together returns, Cat hopes that he can in some way help her reconnect with the drive and optimism of her younger self

In her brilliantly incisive debut, Zalika Reid-Benta artfully depicts the tensions between mothers and daughters, second-generation immigrants and first-generation cultural expectations, and Black identity and predominately white society • Kara Davis is a girl caught in the middle – of her Canadian nationality and her desire to be a ‘true’ Jamaican, of her mother and grandmother’s rages and life lessons, of having to avoid being thought of as too ‘faas’ or too ‘quiet’ or too ‘bold’ or too ‘soft’ • Set in Toronto’s ‘Little Jamaica’, Kara moves from girlhood to the threshold of adulthood, from elementary school to high school graduation, in these twelve interconnected stories • A rich and unforgettable portrait of growing up between worlds, Frying Plantain shows how, in one charged moment, friendship and love can turn to enmity and hate, well-meaning protection can become control, and teasing play can turn to something much darker

1987, Hong Kong. Trying to outrun his demons, a young man who calls himself Buddha returns to the bustling place of his birth. He moves into a small Buddhist nunnery in the crumbling neighbourhood of Diamond Hill, where planes landing at the nearby airport fly so close overhead that travellers can see into the rooms of those below • As Buddha begins to care for the nuns and their neighbours, this pocket of the old city is vanishing. Even the fiery Iron Nun cannot prevent the frequent landslides that threaten the nunnery she fights for, and in the nearby shanty town, a faded film actress who calls herself Audrey Hepburn is hiding a deep secret and trying to survive with her teenage daughter who has a bigger fish to fry • But no one arrives in Diamond Hill by accident, and Buddha's ties to this place run deeper than he is willing to admit

Seeking solitude after a personal tragedy upends his world, artist Chris travels to his mother's homeland, Jamaica, in a bid to find peace. He expects to spend his time painting in solitude, coming to terms with his loss and the fractured relationship with his father. Instead, he discovers a new extended and complicated 'family' with their own startling stories. Can they help him to become whole again? • Told from different points of view, this is an utterly compelling and deeply relatable novel from the winner of two Commonwealth literary prizes. Fans of Girl, Woman, Other and The Vanishing Half will love this book about friendship, community, chosen family, and healing after trauma

A powerful novel about an intersex Nigerian teenager and the courage to be yourself • Raised as a boy in a grand but unhappy family in Nigeria, Otolorin Akinro escapes to boarding school knowing two things: she is truly a girl, and to stay safe, she must hide that truth • Away from the cruelty of her childhood home, Oto blooms even as she strives to be the best boy she can, finding true friendship and working hard to earn a scholarship to an American university, hoping someone out there might help her understand the secrets her body holds • But she cannot stay away forever. Back home for the holidays, though Oto and her beloved twin sister are overjoyed to see each other, their mother's violence erupts once more and when a terrible incident rips their lives apart, Oto is left alone

They're not bound by family. But a family could tear them apart • Southall, West London. After being released from prison, Zaq Khan is lucky to land a dead-end job at a builders' yard. All he wants to do is keep his head down and put the past behind him • But when Zaq is forced to search for his boss's runaway daughter, he quickly finds himself caught up in a deadly web of deception, murder and revenge • With time running out and pressure mounting, can he find the missing girl before it's too late? And if he does, can he keep her - and himself - alive long enough to deal with the people who want them both dead?

A profoundly unsettling story of a plantation slave's desperate escape into a rainforest beyond human control, with his master and a ferocious dog on his heels • This flight to freedom takes them on a journey that will transform them all, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest and its dense primeval wilderness reshapes reality and time itself • In the darkness, the old man grapples with the spirits of all those who have gone before him; the knowledge that the past is always with us, and the injustice that can cry out from beyond the grave • From a Prix Goncourt writer hailed by Milan Kundera as the "heir of Joyce and Kafka," The Old Slave and the Mastiff fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs - a wise, loving tribute to the Creole culture of Martinique, and a vividly told journey into the heart of Caribbean history and human endurance

An internationally bestselling debut novel: an energetically told, funny and moving book about how strangers become family • Reproduction tells a crooked love story which takes strange, winding paths shaped by community, family and fleeting interactions that leave an inedible imprint • Felicia, a nineteen-year-old West Indian student, and Edgar, an impetuous heir of a wealthy German family, meet when their ailing mothers are assigned the same hospital room. An odd-couple relationship blooms between Edgar and Felicia, ripe with miscommunications and reprisals for perceived and real offences that have some unexpected results • Fast-forward, their son Armistice is a teenager fixated on a variety of get-rich-quick schemes that are as comic as they are indicative of the immigrant son's fear of falling through the cracks

It is 1910 and Philadelphia is burning • The last place Spring wants to be is in the rundown, coloured section of a hospital surrounded by the groans of sick people and the ghost of her dead sister. But as her son Edward lays dying, she has no other choice • There're whispers that Edward drove a streetcar into a shop window. Some people think it was an accident, others claim that it was his fault, the police are certain that he was part of a darker agenda. Is he guilty? Can they find the truth? • All Spring knows is that time is running out. She has to tell him the story of how he came to be. With the help of her dead sister, newspaper clippings and reconstructed memories, she must find a way to get through to him. To shatter the silences that governed her life, she will do everything she can to lead him home

One morning, Deming Guo's mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to her job at a nail salon and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her • With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson • But far from all he's ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents' desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind • Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It's a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past

Meet Charles Ignatius Sancho: his extraordinary story, hidden for three hundred years, is about to be told • I had little right to live, born on a slave ship where my parents both died. But I survived, and indeed, you might say I did more • It's 1746 and Georgian London is not a safe place for a young Black man, especially one who has escaped slavery. After the twinkling lights in the Fleet Street coffee shops are blown out and the great houses have closed their doors for the night, Sancho must dodge slave catchers and worse. The man he hoped would help - a kindly duke who taught him to write - is dying. Sancho is desperate and utterly alone • So how does Charles Ignatius Sancho meet the King, write and play highly acclaimed music, become the first Black person to vote in Britain and lead the fight to end slavery? • It's time for him to tell his story, one that begins on a tempestuous Atlantic Ocean, and ends at the very centre of London life

In this collection of short stories, offbeat characters are caught up in extraordinary situations that test the boundaries of reality • A love-hungry goddess of the sea arrives on an island inhabited by eunuchs • A girl from Martinique moonlights as a Grace Jones impersonator • Dimension-hopping monks sworn to silence must face a bloody reckoning • And a homeless man goes right back, to the very beginning, through a gap in time • Nudibranch is a dark and seductive foray into the surreal