lit reviews

  • Half of a Yellow Sun | Book Review

    I hated ‘Half of a Yellow Sun when I first read it. To be fair, I was only fourteen years old and I had just gotten off the Enid Blyton express. To put it simply, my mind was not yet accustomed to mature themes and I could not get around Ugwu’s gauche yet charming interest…

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  • Disgrace by J M Coetzee | Book Review

    My first interaction with Coetzee’s work was through a Caine Prize anthology in which his story, “Nietverloren” was featured. From the moment I read the concluding sentence of that short story, I just knew it wouldn’t be the last of that man that I would encounter in the literary world. His writing style carried a…

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  • 3:15 AM and other stories| Book review

    I grew up reading books that felt foreign and dishonest, with characters I could not relate to and whose lives I could not quite emulate. From Hans Christian Andersen to Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton, my young imagination was fed by stories of talking mermaids and child detectives, who outsmarted the police and ate cucumber…

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  • Why We Need New Names | Book Review: We Need New Names

    Identity is a central part of human existence and the degree to which it is essential cannot be overstated. So, does Noviolet Bulawayo succeed in communicating the issues that surround contemporary Zimbabwean identity, or is the novel simply an exhausting collection of clichéd issues in African literature? This article will examine the concerns raised in…

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  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: who was the best husband?| Book review

    Warning: This review may contain spoilers☺️ Having been pressured into reading the novel on Twitter and TikTok (as one normally is), I decided to give it a shot and see what it was all about. From the onset, I had assumed that infidelity, misogyny and ‘slut-shaming’ would be central elements of the text, but it…

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