Nadifa Mohamed's Black Mamba Boy Harper Collins, 2009 "...and it's a story that I think hasn't been told before..." That's how Nadifa Mohamed describes her first novel, Black Mamba Boy in this video. Maybe that's a tall order for a novel in 2010. And, then again, maybe not. Consider this.
Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here Random House, 1986 The Women Unbound Reading Challenge was the perfect excuse that I needed to fill the gap in my Dionne Brand reading with her first novel In Another Place, Not Here. I bought my copy on the weekend (I loaned out
Kathryn Stockett's The Help Penguin, 2009 I don't listen to a lot of audiobooks; it's not that I have a philosophical stance against them, I'm just old-fashioned, so the first inclination is to pick up the book. But what I do quite enjoy is having both options, so that if
Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear Bantam Books, 1980 I had started high school when I read Jean Auel's first novel in the Earth's Children series, but I don't know if it was the 9th grade or the 13th. It was my grandmother's copy -- she bought a
Monique Roffey's The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Simon & Schuster, 2009) I was pleased to see that more than half of the Orange Prize shortlisted titles -- including this novel -- were still unread in my stacks. Reading the longlist was a crazy undertaking (see more talk of
