International Women's Day Collection

Be swept away by sun, sea, self-love and a delicious dollop of romance in this original, multicultural romance novel set between London and Ghana. Introducing your new, favourite girl-next-door Faye Bonsu.

Dismissed as a cultural lightweight by the man she is desperate to please, under-achieving PA, Faye Bonsu, is on a mission to find love. A disastrous night out leaves pasta-fanatic Faye's romantic dreams in tatters and underscores her alienation from her African heritage. Leaving her cosy middle-class life in London's leafy Hampstead to find out what she's missing, Faye is whisked into the hectic social whirlpool of Ghana where she meets the handsome Rocky Asante, a cynical, career-obsessed banker with no time for women... until now.

Transported into a world of food, fun and sun, and faced with choices she had never thought possible, Faye is forced to discover that no matter how far you travel, you can't find love until you find yourself.

From Pasta to Pigfoot is a fun, contemporary, multi-cultural novel that explores in a light-hearted way the clash of cultures that has become characteristic of our increasingly multicultural society.

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.

Breaking the Maafa Chain chronicles two sisters' struggle for true freedom in the mid-nineteenth century, when transporting slaves from Africa to America was an illegal but lucrative business

Nineteenth century-Two sisters, Fatmata and Salimatu, are captured and sold separately into slavery. Forced to change their names to Faith and Sarah, they end up in two different countries with opposite slavery laws. Faith ends up in America, where slavery is still legal and slaves don't have any rights. Sarah ends up in a Victorian England and as the goddaughter of Queen Victoria. Can the two sisters reclaim their freedom and identity in a world that is trying to break them down and mold them to its coloniser's will?

Based on the true story of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, Breaking the Maafa Chain will take the readers on a journey of loss, survival, hope, identity and tradition.

When a child's severed hand is found, DC Toks Ade and DS Philip Dean are put on the case. Thrown into a world of Nigerian traditional customs, ritual sacrifice, and international human trafficking, they must find the guilty parties before more children are lost and more limbs are found.
Jacob Ross, author of the Bone Readers Stella Oni brings a welcome new voice and an engagingly fresh perspective in her superbly executed debut crime novel, Deadly Sacrifice. A totally absorbing read.
Nii Ayikwei Parkes, author of TAIL OF THE BLUE BIRD An audacious debut novel...

Winnie M Li, author of DARK CHAPTER Deadly Sacrifice is a gripping read. It's a foray into the gritty underbelly of human trafficking and London's more deprived communities, where immigration and social stratification are interlinked in 21st-century Britain. A chilling tale, powered by a likeable Nigerian-British heroine.

On Reflection: Moments, Flight and Nothing New attempts to grapple with the complexities of our present moment. Personal and imagined stories appear as fragments of everyday scenes forming a narrative of self-discovery. Vignettes accompanied by photography explore life's contradictions, trauma, and the ways in which we navigate the fluidity of cities.

The poems move back and forth in time and across Europe, highlighting a range of experiences and perspectives of our modern society as a series of snapshots. In each, we catch a glimpse of ourselves, demonstrating how such moments and characters influence our journeys. Written from the consciousness of a British Ghanaian, the collection is a love letter to the lived and shared experience of those struggling and learning about the various intersections of their identity. Through the voice of Akos and other characters, Wiredu reaches to understand the significance of history, its effect on an evolving African diaspora in Europe, and finds hope in the present as she proposes an optimistic dialogue about the future.

A story about family, politics and journeying through a fractured country in a delicate time, The Havoc of Choice explores the long reaching effects of colonisation and corruption within the context of a singular household and the disparate experiences of class and clan they encapsulate.

2007, Kenya. Long held captive by her father's shadow of corruption, Kavata has spent her life suffocated by political machinations. When her husband decides to run in the next election, these shadows threaten to consume her home. Unable to bear this darkness, Kavata plots to escape.

As her family falls apart, so too does her country. In the wake of Kenya's post-election turmoil, Kavata and her family must find their way back to each other across a landscape of wide-spread confusion, desperation, and heartrending loss.

One of the first pieces of long fiction from Kenya to explore its 2007 post-election violence (PEV) in such detail, The Havoc of Choice is a delicate and deeply personal attempt to understand the root of this spontaneous yet organised conflict and to figure out what healing looks like for the people of Kenya.

Pasta-fanatic, girl-next-door Faye Bonsu is back for another adventure in love, life and culture!

Faye Bonsu seems to have it all: a drop-dead gorgeous and successful boyfriend, a bourgeoning career as an interior designer and a rent-free mansion in leafy Hampstead to call home. But with all her friends shifting into yummy-mummy mode, a man who seems to have no desire to put a ring on it, tricky clients, and a very attractive and single boss, things are not quite as simple as they might appear.
Hoping to escape from her suddenly complicated life and revive her wilting romance, Faye returns to sunny Ghana for what she hopes will be the time of her life. But life doesn't always offer second chances and when disaster strikes, she is forced to confront the biggest question of her life and to make a choice that comes with consequences she will have to live with forever.

New York Times bestselling author, comedian, actress, and producer Phoebe Robinson is back with a new essay collection that is equal parts thoughtful, hilarious, and sharp about human connection, race, hair, travel, dating, Black excellence, and more.

Written in Phoebe's unforgettable voice and with her unparalleled wit, Robinson's latest collection, laced with spot-on pop culture references, takes on a wide range of topics. From the values she learned from her parents (including, but not limited to, advice on not bringing outside germs onto your clean bed) to her and her boyfriend, lovingly known as British Baekoff, deciding to have a child-free union, to the way the Black Lives Matter movement took center stage in America, and, finally, the continual struggle to love her 4C hair, each essay is packed with humor and humanity.

By turns insightful, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartfelt, Please Don't Sit On My Bed In Your Outside Clothes is not only a brilliant look at our current cultural moment, but a collection that will stay with you for years to come.

Born to three generations of women burdened with heartache, can Penny finally break the cycle?

Filled with heady meanderings and sultry secrets, Sun is Sky remarkably captures the spirit of a slumbering town in the Deep South of America. As a young teen, Penny's Hill's fractious relationship with her mother causes her to be shipped off to live with her maternal grandmother in the town of Picayune, Mississippi. Under her Gram's care, Penny settles into her new rural life, but soon family secrets and sudden tragedies force her to face life head on. Her beloved Gram's death shatters any illusions Penny held about her grandmother's legacy and she is left to decide whether she will accept the responsibility and step into Gram's role as the custodian of secrets for the townspeople.

Navigating the trauma familial, sexual and romantic relationships can cause to individual and community psyches, and with the reckoning of many reconciliations, Penny comes to appreciate the power of self-worth, the ability it possesses to heal a person, and the extent to which we are incapacitated without it.

Once a young girl in Somalia who wanted to be in films and escape the domineering grasp of her father, Adua is now an "Old Lira," a woman who immigrated to Italy during the first wave in the 1970's. With the end of the Somalian civil war, Adua begins to seriously consider returning to the country of her birth. Sitting at the foot of the elephant statue that holds up the obelisk in Santa Maria square in Rome, she recounts her story, attempting to make sense of the past forty years and what the future might hold. When she first arrived in Rome and her film dreams ended in failure and shame, she knew she could not return to totalitarian Somalia and the vice-like purview of her father. Once a translator for the Italian colonial regime, her father's past in Italy and the rest of his life in Somalia were characterized by attempts to live fully under the punishing hand of regimes, while Adua was left to reckon with the after-effects of his choices.

Adua is the unforgettable story of a father and daughter grappling with the implications of colonialism, immigration and racism that have bisected both of their lives.

Set in rural Jamaica, Swimming With Fishes evokes the pain of a love affair between a London-born businessman and a native Jamaican and how that affair grows beyond either of their expectations...

Sickle cell anaemia sufferer Kat wants a baby more than life itself. When the town herbalist foretells of a man from across the ocean who will father her child, Kat's hopes intensify into a dream that must come true.

Her encounter with Londoner Ben years later edges the prediction toward reality. Their friendship develops into an all-consuming love to which they both surrender. Unknown to Ben, however, Kat is a sickle cell sufferer; and unknown to Kat, Ben is already married.

Evelyn Dove embraced the worlds of jazz, musical theatre and, most importantly, cabaret, in a career spanning five decades from the 1920s through to the 1960s. A black British diva with movie star looks, she captivated audiences and admirers around the world, enjoying the same appeal as the 'Forces Sweetheart' Vera Lynn throughout the Second World War.

Refusing to be constrained by her race or middle-class West African and English backgrounds, she would perform for infamous Russian leader, Joseph Stalin; become a regular vocalist for the BBC and a celebrated performer across continental Europe, India and the US.

At the height of her fame in the 1930s, she worked with the pioneers of black British theatre, replacing Josephine Baker as the star attraction in a revue at the Casino de Paris and scandalizing her family by appearing on stage semi-nude.

This is a celebration of an extraordinary career punctuated with vertiginous highs and profound lows, and places Dove in historical context with artists of her time, such as Adelaide Hall, Dame Cleo Laine and Dame Shirley Bassey.