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There is a saying that nothing is new under the sun. Everything, somewhere, somehow, has happened before. Every story has been told before. With this notion in mind, it is difficult to imagine that readers get any pleasure from reading. What is there to enjoy if it’s all just an exercise in repetition? But readers and writers alike know that the beauty of literature lies in its ability to surprise, and a great story brings fresh imagination to the telling of a familiar tale. Occasionally, writers stun us readers by creating a work so innovative in its conception, so freshly imaginative in its approach to craft, that it redefines how we think about literature.
In our latest book recommendation, we have compiled a list of seven books that will make you question everything you know about literature. From a plotless novel to a novel written in verse, the books on this list push the boundaries of possibilities in literature, making for a refreshing reading experience.
Read our recommendations below.
texaco
Author: Patrick Chamoiseau
Genre: Fiction
Published in 1992, Texaco is the story of an eponymous shantytown in the suburbs of Martinique. It presents a historical narrative of the town from the personal perspective of one of its indigenous inhabitants, Marie-Sophie Laborieux. The daughter of a freed slave, Marie-Sophie pulls on memory to give an account of her family’s history as well as that of the city’s.
The novel opens in the present day with an attempt to ‘conquer’ the city by an urban developer named Christ. Marie-Sophie’s complex, non-linear narration is interspersed with excerpts from notebooks, journals, and letter, which establish the historical context of the city. These make for a fragmented reading experience which redefines the notion of a novel.
summertime
AUTHOR: j.m. coetzee
GENRE: fiction
In the traditional definition of literature, fiction is quite separate from non-fiction. While the former narrates events invented by the author’s imagination, the latter provides an account of real-life occurrences. However, in his 2009 book, Summertime, South African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee blurs the lines between these two categories.
Summertime is a fictionalized memoir set in mid-70s Cape Town. It is the third in a series of autofiction novels published by the author, detailing the life of John Coetzee, a protagonist who shares important similarities with the author, but also certain significant differences. John Coetzee, for instance, is reported to have died in the novel, after which a fictional biographer compiles and interprets the opinions of five characters on the man.
tremor
AUTHOR: Teju cole
GENRE: fiction
As a teenager in literature class, one learns that plot is an essential element of any story, whether prose or drama. A story is driven from the beginning to the end, one learns, by a series of actions that progress in a cause-and-effect pattern, leading to a climax, and then a resolution. But Nigerian writer, Teju Cole, begs to differ.
In his most recent novel, Tremor, Cole continues his famous aversion to plot by giving us a novel driven not by a series of events in a cause-effect relationship but rather by the sheer strength of narration. The events, though seemingly random, culminate in an exploration of the violence of existence as well as humans’ search for meaning.
The novel follows a Nigerian-American professor of photography, Tunde, as he wanders around the city in which he lives. Part art history, music review, social commentary, and novel, Tremor is no respecter of genre. It defies the received notions of craft, making a resonant case for radical innovation.
Cassava Republic Press is proud to announce the launch of their inaugural $20,000 Global Black Women’s Non-Fiction Manuscript Prize dedicated to exceptional works by Black women. Deadline: 30th June 2024. Learn more here.
The Emperor’s Babe
AUTHOR: Bernadine Evaristo
GENRE: historical fiction
In 2001, Booker prize winner Bernadine Evaristo stunned the world with a rare gem: a novel written in poetry. The Emperor’s Babe is a historical verse novel set in London during the Roman era. It follows the life of Zuleika, an immigrant daughter in the Roman empire who enters an illicit affair with the emperor Septimus Severus which is bound to change the course of her life.
The novel has been called a ‘wildly entertaining and deeply affecting’ book, and the feisty, sexy Zuleika a ‘modern girl living in an ancient world’.
Beasts of No Nation
Author: Uzodinma Iweala
Genre: fiction
Agu, a little boy in an unnamed warring African country, is forced to leave his family when war reaches his little village. As he flees a battle that claims his father’s life, he encounters and is forced to join a group of rebel soldiers consisting of child soldiers and an older commander called Commandant.
Beasts of No Nation details Agu’s experience as he struggles to get accustomed to the horrors of war from within the battalion. Though war fiction is a centuries-old literary genre, this novel stands out as an innovative book for its use of broken English. The novel is told in first person from the perspective of Agu, a semi-literate boy without a good command of English. Reminiscent of classics like The Palmwine Drinkard and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for its use of vernacular English, this novel is proof that African writers can write in whatever language they choose, including broken English.
vagabonds!
AUTHOR: Eloghosa Osunde
GENRE: fiction
Based on popular knowledge, in the world of fictional prose, there are short stories, novellas, and novels. Each is separate and defined by its length and a host of other characteristics. Rarely, if ever, do they mix. But in Nigerian author Eloghosa Osunde’s 2022 book, Vagabonds!, the boundaries between ‘short story’ and ‘novel’ blur.
Vagabonds! is described as a novel-in-stories, an innovative notion that ties a series of short stories together not only through common themes, as most short stories do, but also through the voice and intermittent interjections of the overseeing, omniscient character, Tatafo, the fictional spirit guide of Èkó, the city in which most of the stories take place. The stories explore the lives of different queer characters, from a gay driver working a job that is bound to end his life to the lesbian spirit woman jumping from one body to the next.
The Old Drift
AUTHOR: Namwali Serpell
GENRE: fiction
In most of Zambian author Namwali Serpell’s 2019 debut novel, the narrator is a ‘swarm-like chorus that calls itself man’s greatest nemesis’. One can only speculate about the nature of such a narrator: a horde of mosquitoes? a plague of locusts? However, the story this chorus tells is of three families (Zambian, Italian, and Indian) in the 1900s, living in a settlement called The Old Drift, located just outside Victoria Falls, Zambia (then Rhodesia). A racist colonial settler, Percy M. Clark, intertwines the lives of these three families through his actions narrated in the first chapter of the book.