“When I hit you, Lenin cries”, is what our author’s revolutionary husband tells her after every unnerving beating over the course of their short four month love marriage. Seduced by poetry and politics our young narrator falls for a university professor and accepts his hand in marriage, she moves for him to a new home where she doesn’t speak the language. It starts slowly of course, answering phone calls on her behalf, asking for her Facebook password but escalates into extreme physical and sexual abuse. 

This is not an easy book, our protagonist experiences and survives extreme violence and social isolation at her husband’s hands. There are moments where the brutalities are too much so prepare yourself. That being said, this is many women’s reality and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, #domesticviolence takes the life of millions of people, world wide. In fact, two women are killed in the UK every week by a former or current partner.

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019, a portrait of modern Britain through the eyes and interconnected stories of 12 different British people - mostly women and mostly black, all moving through the world in different times and decades. Each character has a chapter; within the chapters their lives overlap, but their experiences, backgrounds and choices could not be more different. There’s Amma, a lesbian socialist playwright, and non-binary Morgan, who uses the internet to navigate their gender identity – but also Shirley, a teacher who feels alien in Amma’s community, and Winsome, a bride who has arrived from Barbados to an unhappy marriage. Many of the characters are close – friends, relatives or lovers – while others simply visit the same theatre on the same night, or argue with each other on Twitter.

Imagine if there was a network of secret passages, a rail transport system with safe houses, conductors and secret routes through out America that could help slaves escape bondage. A way for them to get into the free states and Canada while avoiding captivity. This is called alternative history.

Set during the 19th century, Colson Whitehead takes us to the plantations of the southeastern United States, expertly re-creating the unique terrors felt by black Americans pre-civil war. Our protagonist is Cora, a determined teenage slave who makes a bid for freedom with the help of Caesar, a new arrival from Virginia. There are abolitionists, there are loyalists, slave catchers and sympathisers a plenty. In this ingenious conception, we make our harrowing journey through USA via Cora, encountering a different world with its own horrors in each state.

In reality, The Underground Railroad was not literally a railroad but rather a secretly organised means of movement.

Philip Hutton is a loner. It's 1937 in Malaysia and being the mixed race son of an English father and Chinese mother comes with certain hardships. Never quite fitting in and feeling like an outsider, Philip's life takes a turn when he meets an older Japanese diplomat, Hayato Endo, an aikido master who takes Philip under his tutelage. 

As war looms and the Japanese invade British territory, both Endo and Philip find themselves torn between their loyalty to each other, versus loyalty to their country and family. Philip decides to assist the Japanese and Endo in administering the country in an attempt to keep his family safe, but how far is he willing to betray his countrymen for his sensei?

Set in Penang, this is a story of betrayal, barbaric cruelty, steadfast courage and enduring love.

(You guys know we avoid spoilers like the plague but trust us when we say, it's too hard for this book! So if you're still reading or thinking about reading, just listen out for the spoiler alerts! )

New York Times best selling author Brit Bennett, answers Zainab, Rav and Steven's burning questions about her debut novel, The Mothers. 

We’re going across the pond for this one – all the way to the sunburnt shores of Southern California. Set within a contemporary black military community, The Mothers is described as an emotionally perceptive take on community and ambition. Refreshingly, all the characters in the book are African American unless described otherwise.

Our story orbits around three central characters, beautiful Nadia Turner, an ambitious 17 year old who is recovering from her mother’s suicide, meek and God-fearing Aubrey Evans, the ‘perfect’ church girl with scars that run deep and finally the local pastors son, Luke Sheppard, a former football star who's lost his future to an injury. 

Sorry we've been away for so long! But like Chance the Rapper, we're better than we were the last time. 

In this poignant, eye-opening and emotionally vivid novel, Mahbod Seraji lays bare the beauty and brutality of the centuries-old Persian culture, while reaffirming the human experiences we all share.

In a middle-class neighbourhood of Iran's sprawling capital city, Tehran, 17-year-old Pasha spends the summer of 1973 on his rooftop with his best friend Ahmed, joking around one minute and asking burning questions about life the next. He also hides a secret love for his beautiful neighbor Zari, who has been betrothed since birth to another man. But the bliss of Pasha and Zari's stolen time together is shattered when Pasha unwittingly acts as a beacon for the Shah's secret police.

LONDON CALLING - #InOurMadandFuriousCity takes place over 48 hours in a North London estate. Described by Waterstones as an authentic account of a less visible but fully lived #London.

Our story follows a group of young men and their parents, with “elsewhere in their blood” who live in and around the council estate in Neasden. There's Yusuf, who is doing his best to avoid the attention of local Muslim extremists. Ardan, the aspiring rapper with a troublesome home life and Selvon, an obsessively disciplined athlete desperate to escape the neighbourhood. We have Caroline, one of the older protagonists, who fled Northern Ireland during the Troubles and Selvon, a mute and wheelchair bound man part of the Windrush generation.

 Written by British #SriLankanauthor Guy Gunaratne, we could not pick this book being Londoners ourselves. 

What do you know about Native Americans? Growing up in Britain, our knowledge of Native American culture is very minimal, essentially existing of what Hollywood wishes to portray. That was our biggest motivation for picking this book, we are keen to learn and for our listeners to learn. 

Described as fierce, funny and heartbreaking, Tommy Orange's There There offers up a shattering portrait of America through the eyes of 12 different characters. 

Korea, 1943. Hana has lived her entire life under Japanese occupation. As a haenyeo, a female diver of the sea, she enjoys an independence that few other Koreans can still claim. Until the day Hana saves her younger sister from a Japanese soldier and is herself captured and transported to Manchuria. There she is forced to become a “comfort woman” in a Japanese military brothel. But haenyeo are women of power and strength. She will find her way home.

South Korea, 2011. Emi has spent more than sixty years trying to forget the sacrifice her sister made, but she must confront the past to discover peace. Seeing the healing of her children and her country, can Emi move beyond the legacy of war to find forgiveness?

This is the story of brotherhood, of two young boys growing up in Scarborough, a not so nice part of Toronto. These boys, Francis and Michael, like David Chariandy are or Trinidadian descent; with an overworked black mother who works double, sometimes triple shifts and an absent Indian father. 

Brother explores questions of masculinity, family, race, and identity as they are played out in a Scarborough housing complex during the sweltering heat and simmering violence of the summer of 1991. it’s dangerous and it’s ugly and the author doesn’t try to find beauty in it  – it doesn’t exist. Yet Chariandy still manages to capture the readers imagination, his writing and story telling speak volumes. 

It’s 1948, haughty Hortense Joseph arrives in London from British colonised Jamaica, with her perfect white gloves and full trunk, she is ready for the ‘motherland’. Brought up with the consciousness that her "golden skin" makes her a superior creature in a country of darker skins, she soon discovers that her qualifications have no meaning in Britain and her status is precisely the same as that of any other black migrant. Similarly, her husband, Gilbert, an RAF man, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero in the ‘motherland’, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class.

The novel's other two main characters are their English landlady, Queenie, raised as a farmer's daughter, and Bernard, Queenie's mumbling husband, who arrives back from wartime service to find "coons" renting rooms in his house. Unlike her deeply racist spouse, Queenie serves as refreshing break from bigoted English society.