Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag
This tightly written and quietly smouldering family drama explores the clash between traditional values and progressive liberal ideas. Husband and father Venkat, sees himself as a sensitive, understanding and resourceful man – and he has a shelf of well-thumbed self-help books to prove it. When Venkat’s university age daughter Rekha disappears, however, his carefully constructed world falls apart. Taking place over four days, the hunt for Rekha dredges up old family secrets and betrayals that can no longer be ignored. – Lucinda
The Blackbirds of St Giles by Lila Cain
There are many ways for a person to be enslaved. So discovers Daniel and his young sister Pearl as their escape from a Jamaican cotton plantation leads them many years later to the London. Promised freedom by the King in return for enlisting with the British in the American War of Independence, Daniel arrives in England hopeful of freedom and a chance to make a proper life for himself and Pearl.
Instead he is thrust into the underbelly of St Giles, ensnared in The Rookery – a notorious and desolate London slum. Its outcasts are ruled over by “The King of the Rookery”, Elias, as cruel a man as any they had fled. Desperate to protect his sister, Daniel becomes bound to him, trained up as a fist-fighter to line Elias’ pockets. As he searches the dank, foggy streets for ways to escape, never knowing whom to trust, he is drawn into The Black Apollo and into the arms of a brotherhood of Black men.
Visceral historic fiction at its best – this supremely atmospheric and tense novel, based on a real-life London slum, explores the terrible prejudice and challenges faced by Black people in Georgian London. – Juliette
The Lowlife by Alexander Baron
A rediscovered classic from the 1960s, The Lowlife charts the ups and downs of a Jewish London gambler, unapologetically living from win to win, roaming the streets of his childhood whilst being constantly leant on to settle down and join the treadmill. Refusing to play the game, he is happy to live like a swell one day and survive on scraps the next. This is a grubby Graham Greene-esque novel with a grifter’s swagger, to be read alongside Absolute Beginners and The Lonely Londoners. – Ed