I’ve read just one from the second instalment of March paperbacks. Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece follows three American women of Chinese heritage who first meet in 1983, aged twelve, and maintain a connection into their seventies in a dystopian near future. Each of the friends has a lengthy narrative section charting the very different directions their lives take. Giselle’s thread follows her career as an artist, Jackie guides us through the development of the internet and Ellen is the inveterate activist, always on the fringes of the others’ lives. Tough to keep these three narratives from diverging too far – there was a point when I wondered if Ko might be losing her way, but she brings her characters back together with their final project. An ambitious novel which left me with a great deal to think about. 
Vinson Cunningham’s debut, Great Expectations, follows a young man as he becomes a part of the campaign which results in the election of the country’s first Black president. What he experiences during the eighteen months that take the candidate from the Senate to the White House leads him to reassess his own life and identity as a Black man in America. ‘Meditating on politics and politicians, religion and preachers, fathers and family, Great Expectations is both an emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and a rich novel of ideas, marking the arrival of a major new writer’ which sounds like catnip for me.
Varaidzo’s Manny and the Baby is partly set in my home town on the eve of the Olympics in 2012, and partly in London in 1936 where two sisters are determined to make a splash, one as a writer, the other as a dancer who finds herself attracted to a Jamaican trumpeter. Many years later, Itai has holed up in his late father’s Bath flat realising how little he knows about him while pondering his new friendship with Josh, an athlete feeling the pressure of the Olympics. ‘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’ says the blurb promisingly.
Michael Donkor’s Grow Where They Fall begins when Kwame is ten, always the good boy until his cousin turns up from Ghana. Twenty years later, he’s a popular secondary school teacher, apparently happy and confident but still living a cautious life until the arrival of a new headteacher forces him to face events from his childhood. ‘Grow Where They Fall is a beautifully written, spirited and deeply moving novel about a young man finding the courage to expand the limits of who he might become’ says the blurb.
Eduardo Varela’s Patagonia Route 203 is a road novel which takes its readers through a part of the world I’d love to visit. Parker is saxophone-playing truck driver with a mysterious past whose work takes him through the wild, empty Patagonian landscape, populated by eccentric and mythical characters. When he meets and loses a strong and beautiful woman working for a travelling fair, he becomes determined to find her again. ‘Eduardo Varela creates and reinvents, out of an inhospitable territory where nothing grows, an oceanic and extraordinary landscape. Patagonia Route 203 is an ode to liberty, to movement and to the beauty of creation’ says the blurb of what sounds like an unusual piece of fiction.
That’s it for March. A click on a title will take you either to my review or to a more detailed synopsis should you want to know more, and if you’d like to catch up with part one it’s here. New fiction is here and here.
