Butter is keenly attuned to the many ways the private sphere runs on the disproportionate work of women while deliberately…
In Show Me the Place, Hedley Twidle displays an earnest curiosity about how to inhabit a world that seems to…
JM Coetzee’s late style has often been indifferently received, but The Pole is a beautifully elegant story, writes Wamuwi Mbao,…
New original fiction in The JRB. ~~~ A History of Phantoms By Wamuwi Mbao There comes a time and place…
Thandiwe Ntshinga’s Black Racist Bitch is the sort of book some readers will absolutely love, and others will find unreadable,…
In Yellowface, the contrast is turned up so brightly that the shadows disappear, writes Wamuwi Mbao, but it’s the darkness…
Wamuwi Mbao reviews The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt, a book that contains ‘one of the most alarmingly enjoyable…
The Inheritors by Eve Fairbanks is historical storytelling done well, writes Wamuwi Mbao. The InheritorsEve FairbanksJonathan Ball Publishers, 2023 David…
The JRB presents new fiction by Wamuwi Mbao. Sebenza Sebenza brought recruiters to our villagesAnd took men far away to…
Elif Batuman’s Either/Or is a new and worthy entry into the well-populated gallery of erudite books about people learning how…
The Blinded City by Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon is a lucidly fascinating immersion into the world of the people who occupy the…
Kei Miller’s collection of essays Things I Have Withheld takes the measure of what it means to read and be…
Culture and Liberation: Exile Writings, 1966–1985Alex La GumaEdited by Christopher J LeeSeagull Books 1966 was an interesting year. Future Trump…
Jason Mott, whose Hell of a Book was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction as well as the Sir…
The JRB presents a new short story by Wamuwi Mbao. From the Air Fare forward, you who think that you…
Michaela Coel’s Misfits blends an effervescent sense of social realism with a beguiling clarity, writes Wamuwi Mbao. Misfits: A Personal…
Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland rearranges the furniture of the hardening genre of novels resolved to deal with North America’s history of…
Wamuwi Mbao reviews Susan Abulhawa’s Against The Loveless World, winner of the Palestine Book Award. Against The Loveless WorldSusan AbulhawaBloomsbury…
Claudia Rankine’s Just Us is perhaps the most profound meditation on race and violence to emerge in the first two…
Wamuwi Mbao reviews Rešoketšwe Manenzhe’s novel Scatterlings, winner of the 2020 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award. ScatterlingsRešoketšwe ManenzheJacana Media, 2020 There…
The JRB presents an excerpt from a work-in-progress by Wamuwi Mbao. In Search of an Exit It was a thoughtful…
In The Lie of 1652, Patric Tariq Mellet fills in the ‘before’ that was of little interest to those invested…
Wamuwi Mbao reviews Avni Doshi’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Burnt Sugar. Burnt SugarAvni DoshiPenguin, 2020 The rather selfish belief that one’s…
Wamuwi Mbao reviews Irenosen Okojie’s Nudibranch, the ‘immersively deranged’ collection containing her 2020 Caine Prize-winning story. Nudibranch Irenosen OkojieLittle, Brown,…
The abolition of slavery, formalised gender discrimination, apartheid and other reprehensible ways of being did not occur simply through continued…
Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Ghanaian writer, filmmaker and art historian. On a balmy traffic-clagged Cape Town morning, I meet…
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s new book Manchester Happened reflects the here-and-there double consciousness of living between Uganda and England, writes Wamuwi…
As part of our January Conversation Issue, Wamuwi Mbao chats to Nicole Dennis-Benn about her work, the process of writing…
Between Baldwin, the world and the Old South—Wamuwi Mbao reviews The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Water DancerTa-Nehisi CoatesHamish…
The Nickel Boys is a powerfully controlled novel in which the main character learns that there are no rules by…
A novel of feminist radicalism, readable in the best sense of the word—Wamuwi Mbao reviews Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn, who will be…
The JRB presents new short fiction by Editorial Advisory Panel member and regular contributor Wamuwi Mbao. ~ ~ ~ Beginnings….
Wamuwi Mbao reviews Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall by Adam Habib, finding it engrossing, but ultimately unconvincing. Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall…
Wamuwi Mbao reviews Diana Evans’s novel Ordinary People, which has been longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction….
Wamuwi Mbao chats to Namwali Serpell about her debut novel, The Old Drift. Namwali Serpell The Old Drift Penguin Random…
Sally Rooney reshapes our understanding of the ordinary in a manner that invites us to imagine better ways of being,…
Wamuwi Mbao imagines a serial adaptation of Angela Makholwa’s Black Widow Society, a sleekly executed interpretation of HJ Golakai’s The Lazarus…
Lisa Halliday’s debut Asymmetry is a genuinely surprising novel, which invites us to question how men and women are rendered in…
OK, Mr Field, the debut novel by acclaimed South African poet Katharine Kilalea, is a pleasingly minimalist, idiosyncratic novel, writes…
Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York, reissued fourteen years after its first publication, endures in the quality of its writing and…
