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Doomi Golo - The Hidden Notebooks by Boubacar Boris Diop

The first novel to be translated from Wolof to English, Doomi Golo—The Hidden Notebooks is a masterful work that conveys the story of Nguirane Faye and his attempts to communicate with his grandson before he dies. With a narrative structure that beautifully imitates the movements of a musical piece, Diop relates Faye’s trauma of losing his only son, Assane Tall, which is compounded by his grandson Badou’s migration to an unknown destination. While Faye feels certain that his grandson will return one day, he also is convinced that he will no longer be alive by then. Faye spends his days sitting under a mango tree in the courtyard of his home, reminiscing and observing his surroundings. He speaks to Badou through his seven notebooks, six of which are revealed to the reader, while the seventh, the “Book of Secrets,” is highly confidential and reserved for Badou’s eyes only. In the absence of letters from Badou, the notebooks form the only possible means of communication between the two, carrying within them tunes and repetitions that give this novel its unusual shape: loose and meandering on the one hand, coherent and tightly interwoven on the other. Translated by Vera Wülfing-Leckie and El Hadji Moustapha Diop.

October by Zoe Wicomb

When Zoë Wicomb burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with the now-classic You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, she was instantly recognized as an essential voice of the South African diaspora, hailed by her literary contemporaries—such as Toni Morrison and J.M. Coetzee, among others—and by reviewers alike as “a writer of rare brilliance” (The Scotsman) and a “sophisticated storyteller” (The New York Times). Since then, her carefully textured writing has cemented her reputation among the most distinguished South African writers and earned her one of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction Writing.

Now, with a full heart, Wicomb returns to tell the story of Mercia Murray. Abandoned by her partner in Scotland, where she has been living for twenty-five years, Mercia returns to her homeland of South Africa to find her family overwhelmed by their alcoholism and secrets. Poised between her new life in Scotland and her own life in South Africa, she recollects the past with a keen sense of irony as she searches for some idea of a home. October brilliantly plumbs the emotional limbo of a woman who is isolated and deracinated. It is a stark and utterly compelling novel about the contemporary experience of a woman caught between cultures, adrift in middle age with her memories and an uncertain future.

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