Jhalak Prose 2025

Every second of Anuri’s life has been documented on social media. Now, it's time to take back control.Anuri's stepmother, Ophelia, is the ultimate 'mumfluencer'. Throughout Anuri's childhood, she catalogued every minute, milestone and carefully curated family outing on social media, cultivating a devoted—and sizeable—following. Now twenty-five, life looks pretty perfect on the outside. Ophelia's fans could be forgiven for wondering why Anuri spends much of her time insulting men online for money, battling the call of alcohol, running from a PhD application, and reminding herself that she is now allowed to choose her own outfits.But when she sees her little sister being pushed down the same rocky path by Ophelia, she decides to take back control. Her stepmother, however, isn't giving up without a fight.Put away your phone and get ready to rethink your 'harmless' social media habit in this darkly hilarious page-turner from an exciting new voice.

Jamila Shah is twenty-nine and exhausted.An immigration solicitor tasked with running the precious family law firm, Jamila is prone to being woken in the middle of the night by frantic phone calls from clients on the cusp of deportation. Working under the shadow of the government’s ‘hostile environment’, she constantly prays and hopes that their ‘determinations’ will result in her clients being allowed to stay.With no time for friends, family or even herself (never mind a needy partner), Jamila’s life feels hectic and out of control. Then a breakdown of sorts forces her to seek change — to pursue her own happiness while navigating the endless expectations that the world seems to have of her, and still committing herself to a career devoted to helping others.In this polyphonic, assured and character-driven debut, we meet the staff of Shah & Co Solicitors, who themselves arrived in the UK not too long ago, and their clients, more recent arrivals who are made to jump through hoops to create a life for themselves whilst trying to achieve some semblance of normality.

A prize-winning memoirist and nature writer turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future.A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?In fourteen essays, Dispersals explores the entanglements of plants and people, from species considered invasive, like giant hogweed, to those vilified but intimate, like soy, and to those, like kelp, on which our futures depend. The plants in this collection are perceived as being ‘out of place’—weeds, samples collected through imperial science, and crops introduced and transformed by our hand. Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on how both plants and people come to belong, why both cross borders, and how our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

She is momentarily furious. Hasn't she seen at five the red blood of fishes? Hasn't she dipped her fingers in their guts, watched them tug at life on her father's lap, seen them laid out in silver like a cut dream?In a magnetic follow-up to Winter Animals, Ashani Lewis takes a delightfully candid approach to facets of desire and loneliness, cut through with breathtaking lyricism.Lewis' debut short story collection creates a stark world of fleeting infatuations, violent compulsions, unexpected solace and the sombre ghost of memories. A dying woman dedicates her life to Antarctic ice; a romance ends with an imitation oyster; a man believes the mother of his child has become a witch; the potential success of a marriage is indistinguishable from a couple's hike of Everest — in these striking stories, Lewis takes a kaleidoscopic, unforgiving look at its obsessions, its grotesque demands and the distance it creates between us.

London, 1936. Two sisters are ready to take the city and the world by storm.Bath, 2012. Two young Black men are figuring out who they are, and who they want to become.Manny is forthright, intellectual, and determined to make her mark on the London literary scene. Her younger sister Rita, the Baby, just wants to dance. In the smoky clubs that pulsate underneath Soho’s vibrant streets, Rita finds herself drawn into a new world of Black ambition, along with the masterful mimic and trumpeter, Ezekiel Brown, from Jamaica. As tensions rise and the shadow of fascism and war snaps at their heels, the two sisters are faced with choices that will alter their lives forever.Itai has fled London to his late father’s flat in Bath. Listening to cassette tapes his father made, he feels both drawn in and shut out of his former life — who is Rita? Why did his father record her life story? And where can he find her now, to return the tapes? Meanwhile, his developing friendship with Josh, a young athlete who moonlights as a dealer to fund his training for the next Olympics, is on unsteady ground, as Josh has been sent by his bosses to find out what the hell Itai is doing in Bath.Manny and the Baby is a character-driven debut novel, full of heart, about what it means to be Black and British, now and in the past.EndorsementsStylist Best New Fiction of 2024A Bookseller ‘One to Watch’‘Manny and the Baby stood out for me from the first few lines. The beautifully balanced prose, the wonderful story, and sumptuous detail are constructed with poetic precision and held my attention right until the very end.’ — Jacqueline Crooks, author of Fire Rush‘An incredibly special writer, thoughtful and energetic, occasionally savage, wise beyond her years, with an eye and an ear for syntax that is masterful ... Varaidzo is the future, and Manny and the Baby is a book for the ages.’ — Nikesh ShuklaIncluded in NetGalley’s 2024 Hot List

The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and although nothing does, we continue, inside our dream.One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would jeopardize their safety.When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face to face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him, but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.A luminous novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile. A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author at the peak of his powers.

I may not be brave enough, but somewhere deep inside of me there is, perhaps, the kernel of someone who is.That brave someone was the legendary Nusayba bint Ka'ab al Khazrajia, who fought alongside the Prophet Muhammad at the dawn of Islam, the author N.S. Nuseibeh's ancestor. In drawing on Nusayba's stories, Nuseibeh delves into the experience of being an Arab woman today and in the distant past – taking her from superheroes and the glorification of violence to the rise of Arab feminism, to what courage looks like in the context of interminable conflict. By seeking to understand her namesake in the context of her own twenty-first century concerns, Nuseibeh links our current ideas of Muslims and Arabs with their origins, exploring myth-making and identity, religion and nationhood, feminism and race.As intimate as they are thoughtful, these linked essays offer a dazzling exploration of heritage, gender and the idea of home, while also showing how connecting with our history can help us understand ourselves and others today.Endorsements'A wonderful book about the deep backstories and the tangled histories of N. S. Nuseibeh's own multiple identities.' — Mark Haddon'Explores vulnerability, fragility, anxiety, and ambivalence as ways of beautifully coming to terms with the wounds and worries of the world.' — Homi K. Bhabha

A boy meets a girl. The past meets the future. A finger meets a trigger. The beginning meets the end. England is forever. England must fall.In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering 'expats' from across history to test the limits of time-travel.Her role is to work as a 'bridge': living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as '1847' - Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as 'washing machine', 'Spotify' and 'the collapse of the British Empire'. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more.But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?

Richly imaginative and powerfully empathetic, an intimate portrait of five remarkable Black men, and a meditation on race, estrangement and the search for home.In the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger. Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type.What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? And what happens beneath the mask?In answer, Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira, a nineteenth-century actor and playwright. Matthew, a polar explorer. Frantz, a psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm, an activist leader. Justin, a million-pound footballer. Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future.Ekow Eshun tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. He locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger.

On the cusp of thirty, Ghanaian Londoner Whitney Appiah has a special gift. She is a massage therapist who can physically sense where her clients’ trauma lies and heal it. But Whitney has no idea that she too is suffering. Tragic events from her youth have left a terrible, unseen mark. When a dangerous encounter with the man she’s dating triggers a wave of fragmented recollections, Whitney embarks on a journey to reclaim her memories and the truth that is buried deep in her early years growing up in Kumasi, Ghana during the 1990s.Spanning three decades, told through the viewpoints of Whitney, sisters Gloria and Aretha, and their house help Maame Serwaa, The Rest of You explores what happens when we try to move forward through the lacuna of our past.A strikingly original novel inspired by the Twi proverb of Sankofa: looking back in order to move forward, The Rest of You is a story of generational healing, what it means to be Black British, and surviving familial migrant journeys. Tackling darkly serious themes yet full of hope and optimism, and told with an eye towards the future, Maame Blue’s extraordinary tale is an unforgettable celebration of womanhood, friendship, and family.A potent blend of Queenie and The Vanishing Half.

Maya's life is safe, predictable, quiet...She spends her days at the same job she's been at for years, her evenings watching Bollywood movies with her parents and her Saturday nights eating out at the same restaurant with her childhood best friend.When Maya meets Noah on the Underground, for twenty glorious minutes her life becomes exciting—until he jumps off the train, accidentally leaving behind a notebook containing a list of thirty things he wants to do before he turns thirty.Crushed by the abrupt ending to what could have been her happily ever after, Maya challenges herself to work through the items on his list, secretly hoping that whilst climbing out of her rut and (quite literally) climbing mountains, she may find Noah as well as herself. Instead, she meets Zakariya; an annoying suitor brought to her by her parents via a dodgy marriage CV.But how can a flawed, real-life person ever compare to the man in the notebook?Endorsements'An engaging and enjoyable romcom' — Aliya Ali-Afzal'A warm hug of a book' — Sara Jafari

I met people who never quite fit in where they were supposed to, who found solace, salvation and meaning in these sounds, these words.Something is happening in Britain, trembling the tracks as it unfolds. Recent years have borne witness to underground genres leaking out from the inner cities, going on to become some of the most popular music in the nation.In this groundbreaking social history, journalist Aniefiok Ekpoudom travels the country to paint a compelling portrait of the dawn, boom and subsequent blossoming of UK rap and grime. Taking us from the heart of south London to the West Midlands and South Wales, he explores how a history of migration and an enduring spirit of resistance have shaped the current realities of these linked communities and the music they produce. These sounds have become vessels for the marginalised, carrying Black and working-class stories into the light.Vividly depicted and compassionately told, Where We Come From weaves together intimate stories of resilience, courage and loss, as well as a shared music culture that gave refuge and purpose to those in search of belonging. Ekpoudom offers a rich chronicle of rap, identity, place and, above all, the social and human condition in modern Britain.A stunning social history of British rap and grime by one of the nation's foremost cultural chroniclers.Endorsements'A stunning exploration of a genre, a movement and a world. It's every bit as lyrical as the rap Ekpoudom has documented.' — Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie'Illuminating and intimate. Ekpoudom's prose is rhythmic and deft but also crackles with joy. I know I'll be reading it for years to come.' — Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Small Worlds'[An] engaging, erudite, sweeping social history of grime in Britain . . . The writing is sublime.' — Gary Younge, New Statesman'Brims with life and reverberates, long after you have closed its pages, with a quiet, lasting power.' — Evening Standard'Ekpoudom is, hands down, one of Britain's best music writers, as attested by his new book, Where We Come From, a kaleidoscopic, state-of-the-nation social and cultural history.' — The Face'Where We Come From emerges as more than just a historical account; it's a mixtape and a comprehensive journey through Britain told from the perspective of the people who have spent the past seventy years shaping the culture.' — Frieze'A rousing, inspiring, often breathtaking history that reads with the flow of a magnificent novel. Ekpoudom is one of the very finest chroniclers of black British culture.' — Musa Okwonga, author of One Of Them'A landmark work that will undoubtedly shape conversations about not just UK rap and grime, but British music for years to come.' — Yomi Adegoke, author of The List