Madame Sosostris & The Pageant for the Damaged Hearted by Ben Okri (Head of Zeus, £14.99)
Madame Sosostris, that “well-known clairvoyante” who first seems with tarot playing cards and a foul chilly in TS Eliot’s Modernist masterpiece The Waste Land, is resuscitated right here on this surreal new novel by Ben Okri. Launched as “a migration from a well-known poem”, she arrives as a particular visitor at a Midsummer Evening’s Dream-style costume get together, in celebration of “a competition for the broken-hearted”. The competition has been organised by Viv, on the twentieth anniversary of the day her husband left her, and takes place in a fairytale chateau within the South of France, the place numerous well-known characters from literary and artwork historical past waltz by means of the narrative in mysterious fancy costume. The novel is imprecise at instances, however filled with wealthy hallucinatory imagery and enjoyably vibrant symbolism. Maija Makela
Beneath a Steel Sky: A Journey Via Minerals, Greed and Surprise by Philip Marsden (Granta, £20)
Starting within the writer’s native Cornwall, Beneath a Steel Sky takes the reader by means of a wierd and mystical historical past of metals that’s as darkish as it’s dazzling. Probing the untold geological tales of the minerals beneath our ft, Marsden follows a meandering quest throughout Europe that uncovers histories of peat extraction within the Netherlands, gold-mining in Georgia and a wealthy internet of mercury, radium, silver and extra within the lands in-between. With a story as compelling and typically fantastical as a novel, Marsden by no means shies away from the darker counterparts to those histories of scientific discovery, and the result’s a well timed reminder of the hazards of an financial system of extraction, detailed in a equally dreamlike prose to Robert McFarlane and WG Sebald. Maija Makela
Do Not Attempt to Turn out to be a Buddha by Myozan Ian Kilroy (Knowledge Publications, £21)
Devotional, biographical and historic in content material, Do Not Attempt to Turn out to be a Buddha is an evocative and corrective information to the follow and historical past of Zen Buddhism in Eire. Kilroy’s reflections on the character of actuality, rising from his personal educating and follow, are difficult, enlightening and compellingly written. The survey of the historical past and foreign money of Zen Buddhism in Eire with which the e book closes provides voice to the non secular lineage and current realities of a major spiritual minority in a cultural panorama nonetheless dominated by Christian constructions and norms. Written with candour and unaffected magnificence, this e book will show to be a gracious and rigorous introductory textual content for anybody within the ideas, follow and place of Zen Buddhism within the Irish context. Andrew Roycroft
Hail Mary by Funmi Fetto (Magpie, £16.99)
Funmi Fetto’s debut assortment of brief tales will draw the reader into the compelling lives of 9 Nigerian ladies. These are ladies who confront the cultural expectations of worlds occupied by spiritual fanatics, rip-off artists, ignorance, secrecy, violence, longing, and deadbeat husbands. Our 9 ladies uncover that whereas rejecting custom could deliver freedom, it comes at the price of loneliness and isolation. The gathering positive aspects momentum because the tales progress, ending on a excessive with the exceptional The Tail of a Small Lizard. Nevertheless, the tales are sometimes let down by undercooked endings that don’t parallel the wealthy complexity that the writer brings to her characters and the worlds by which they reside. Nonetheless, Funmi proves herself with this assortment, as a author with nice potential. Brigid O’Dea
Dawn in Gaza, edited by Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller (Saqi Books, £14.99)
Dawn in Gaza is an anthology that seeks to protect tales of Palestinian lives and cultures, earlier than and through Israel’s genocidal marketing campaign. There are almost 100 accounts, from memoirs and prose poems to diary entries and transcribed voice notes. The contributors are artists, medical doctors, legal professionals, shopkeepers; individuals who stayed and individuals who left; individuals who survived and individuals who didn’t. A person lists the possessions in his household residence, and wonders if it could have been higher to remain amongst them and die. A peace activist describes the second his seven-year-old-son stated he wished to be a martyr. These are tales you don’t learn within the information. Recording them is an act of resistance in opposition to erasure. Ruby Eastwood
Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo (Faber & Faber, £9.99)
First revealed in 1977 and now reissued as a contemporary basic, this can be a story about colonisation and the black diaspora. Sissie travels to Germany from Ghana on a pupil scholarship and is annoyed by how she is seen as a black girl earlier than the rest. Later in London, observing the wretchedness of black folks’s lives and their wrestle to adapt to the chilly local weather, but stay in thrall to their host nation, the writer writes, “Sissie bled as she tried to take the scene in.” There may be an indignant undertone all through which turns into extra marked when the writer modifications from prose to verse. She writes a letter to a lover and admonishes him for staying in exile when he has duties to his homeland, however doesn’t ship it. Ilse McDonagh
