As a child, I was an avid reader. However, I noticed none of the characters I read about looked like me. As a Black girl growing up in London, I yearned for stories that reflected my experiences. Thankfully, by the time I was a teenager, I was able to immerse myself in books written by some amazing African American authors. There was still something missing on my reading list, though. The stories of Black people who lived where I did, especially those from the past. Fast forward to now, and as an author of historical fiction, my passion is telling, writing, and highlighting ‘forgotten’ stories.
This book covers the comprehensive history of the Black presence in Britain. It had everything I needed and more when researching my own historical fiction novels. Growing up in the UK, the only part pertaining to Black history was a brief mention of the transatlantic slave trade and nothing that pointed to the Black presence in the UK.
I found this book very well-researched by the author and was fascinated by the wealth of information, some of which I did not know. It also reminded me of why I love writing historical fiction!
'[A] comprehensive and important history of black Britain . . . Written with a wonderful clarity of style and with great force and passion.' - Kwasi Kwarteng, Sunday Times
In this vital re-examination of a shared history, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing story of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean.
This edition, fully revised and updated, features a new chapter encompassing the Windrush scandal and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, events which put black British history at the centre of urgent national debate. Black…
This gorgeous book was one of the first mainstream stories I had seen that addressed the Black presence during World War 2.
Although it was released a good few years before my first historical fiction novel was published, reading it surely planted those early seeds for my later books. Of bringing untold Black British stories to light. To remind us all that history has been whitewashed and so many untold stories exist.
Hortense shared Gilbert's dream of leaving Jamaica and coming to England to start a better life. But when she at last joins her husband, she is shocked by London's shabbiness and horrified at the way the English live. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was. Queenie's neighbours do not approve of her choice of tenants, and neither would her husband, were he there. Through the stories of these people, Small Island explores a point in England's past when the country began to change.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I like how this book is both personal and factual in assessing Britain’s imperial past. I’ve always loved this author’s work, and she said some lovely things about my novel The Attic Child.
Her writing really makes you think about the subject matter and want to find out more...
From Afua Hirsch - co-presenter of Samuel L. Jackson's major BBC TV series Enslaved - the Sunday Times bestseller that reveals the uncomfortable truth about race and identity in Britain today.
You're British.
Your parents are British.
Your partner, your children and most of your friends are British.
So why do people keep asking where you're from?
We are a nation in denial about our imperial past and the racism that plagues our present. Brit(ish) is Afua Hirsch's personal and provocative exploration of how this came to be - and an urgent call for change.
This book is a fictionalized and sometimes humorous account of a fourteen-year-old who ran away to join the army. It highlights the African soldiers who fought in World War 2 as part of the British army and is based on the experience of the author’s own father.
As mentioned above, the existence of this book and others like it contradicts what I had been taught during those very long-winded history lessons at school…
A few months ago fourteen-year-old Ali Banana was apprenticed to a whip-wielding blacksmith in his rural hometown. Now its winter 1944, the war is entering its most crucial stage and Ali is a private in Thunder Brigade. His unit has been given orders to go behind enemy lines and wreak havoc. But the Burmese jungle is a mud-riven, treacherous place, riddled with Japanese snipers, insanity and disease.
Burma Boy is a horrific, vividly realised account of the madness, the sacrifice and the dark humour of the Second World War's most vicious battleground. It's also the moving story of a boy…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
Charles Ignatius Sancho, born in 1729 was the first Black man to vote in Britain. His famous painting as well as his writings have been readily available for some time now. However, what this book has done is weave these stories into a narrative that is part fact, part fiction. I like to do the same with my own novels as in ‘filling the blanks of someone’s life’. The life of a person who once lived and who once breathed.
I love that this novel includes scenes set in Georgian London. A Black man in such a historical setting is not a familiar subject of books!
Two children trapped in the same attic, almost a century apart, bound by a secret.
1907: Twelve-year-old Celestine spends most of his time locked in an attic room of a large house by the sea. Taken from his homeland and treated as an unpaid servant, he dreams of his family in Africa even if, as the years pass, he struggles to remember his mother’s face and sometimes his real name...Decades later, Lowra, a young orphan girl born into wealth and privilege, will find herself banished to the same attic. Lying under the floorboards of the room is an old porcelain doll, an unusual beaded claw necklace and, most curiously, a sentence etched on the wall behind an old cupboard, written in an unidentifiable language.
Selected by Deesha Philyaw as winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Lake Song is set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region. This novel in stories spans decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the…
A grumpy-sunshine, slow-burn, sweet-and-steamy romance set in wild and beautiful small-town Colorado. Lane Gravers is a wanderer, adventurer, yoga instructor, and social butterfly when she meets reserved, quiet, pensive Logan Hickory, a loner inventor with a painful past.
Dive into this small-town, steamy romance between two opposites who find love…
