Here are 100 books that At Night All Blood Is Black fans have personally recommended if you like
At Night All Blood Is Black.
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I'm a poet and creative mentor, and it’s the intensity of poetic language – its expansiveness and limitations – that shows up in my fiction and in the novels I love. Quinnis an exploration of male violence, incarceration, and radical forgiveness. I’ve spent a decade working with long-term prisoners in Scotland, trying to understand and come to terms with notions of justice and responsibility: does guilt begin and end with the perpetrator of a violent act or are we all in some way culpable? How can literary form dig into this question aslant? Can the unsettled mind be a space for innovative thinking?
Hedayat (1903-1951) was an Iranian writer who knew that death and the mythic experience of Kairos time exists a hair’s breadth away from what we commonly experience as human life.
The Blind Owl was the book that gave me permission to write fiction: instead of writing a novel in standard form, I wanted to create a liminal space, a threshold world between real and unreal; to invite readers into an unfamiliar (and hopefully transformative) vision of humanity.
This is exactly what Hedayat does in The Blind Owl: we are immersed in a fable of otherworldly, repetitive, poetic, dark, and mesmerising power. The story (of jealousy, despair, the cyclical nature of life and death) has a rare depth and a sense of universal reach precisely because it has one foot in the liminal.
Widely regarded as Sadegh Hedayat's masterpiece, the Blind Owl is the most important work of literature to come out of Iran in the past century. On the surface this work seems to be a tale of doomed love, but with the turning of each page basic facts become obscure and the reader soon realizes this book is much more than a love story. Although the Blind Owl has been compared to the works of the Kafka, Rilke and Poe, this work defies categorization. Lescot's French translation made the Blind Owl world-famous, while D.P. Costello's English translation made it largely accessible.…
I'm a poet and creative mentor, and it’s the intensity of poetic language – its expansiveness and limitations – that shows up in my fiction and in the novels I love. Quinnis an exploration of male violence, incarceration, and radical forgiveness. I’ve spent a decade working with long-term prisoners in Scotland, trying to understand and come to terms with notions of justice and responsibility: does guilt begin and end with the perpetrator of a violent act or are we all in some way culpable? How can literary form dig into this question aslant? Can the unsettled mind be a space for innovative thinking?
Kristóf (1935-2011) was a Hungarian writer who fled to Switzerland during the war and wrote in French.
The Notebook (the first in the trilogy) is currently number one on my list of all-time favourites. It has all the elements of storytelling that I love: deep, psychological insight into the human heart; adroit use of archetypes, which give the book a timeless, folkloric feel; concision (no waffling) and a poetic, pared-back language that creates a sense of startling immediacy.
Kristóf writes about World War II through the eyes of two young brothers in a Nazi-occupied country (unnamed), and she shocks us awake not through sensationalised violence but through matter-of-fact narration.
It reads like a cross-between dramatic monologue and biblical parable – she stretches the novel form and opens up new possibilities for writing.
I studied psychology in college and am fascinated with the human mind. The psyche holds so many joys, wonders, and the deepest horrors imaginable, all compact and functioning within our skulls. My love for psychology grew into the horror realm, where I read and watched anything revolving around the character study of an individual driven to the brink. Now, I write stories about the morality of actions taken by those who have found themselves in a peculiar position. I believe there is more to the clean-cut view of right versus wrong regarding the decision-making of one’s self-preservation.
Like meat, this book was hard to digest. It made me feel anxiety, turmoil, and pain despite my uncertainty as to what exactly triggered these responses. The isolated experience of a woman believing herself to be a tree, attempting to achieve spiritual happiness while others overstepped their boundaries, felt so very violating and personal.
I love it when stories slice me down raw, revealing wounds I did not know existed beneath my skin.
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more 'plant-like' existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision is a shocking act of subversion. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism. His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide…
I'm a poet and creative mentor, and it’s the intensity of poetic language – its expansiveness and limitations – that shows up in my fiction and in the novels I love. Quinnis an exploration of male violence, incarceration, and radical forgiveness. I’ve spent a decade working with long-term prisoners in Scotland, trying to understand and come to terms with notions of justice and responsibility: does guilt begin and end with the perpetrator of a violent act or are we all in some way culpable? How can literary form dig into this question aslant? Can the unsettled mind be a space for innovative thinking?
Repila (b.1978) is a Spanish writer, whose work was recommended to me by a UK publisher: “The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse is a work of mythic genius that portrays tragic inevitability in a quite terrifyingly awesome way (I mean awesome in the archaic sense)."
The book tells the story of two brothers – Big and Small – trapped in a deep well and slowly starving to death. The language is precise and gut-wrenching, but the narrative reaches beyond its own particulars – compelling as they are – to work as a furious allegory of inequality and injustice.
What I love about the book is precisely this combination: one visceral scene in a well becomes a global commentary on the shadow side of the human.
'It looks impossible to get out,' he says. And also: 'But we'll get out.'
Two brothers, Big and Small, are trapped at the bottom of a well. They have no food and little chance of rescue. Only the tempting spectre of insanity offers a way out. As Small's wits fail, Big formulates a desperate plan.
With the authority of the darkest fables, and the horrifying inevitability of all-too-real life, Repila's unique allegory explores the depths of human desperation and, ultimately, our almost unending capacity for hope.
It took years of being an undercover writer turned book blogger for me to realize just how much of what's considered African fiction is Western publishers' profiteering efforts to churn out novels centered on colonial trauma after postcolonial trauma tailored to white audiences. When does the African reader get a break? When do we read books that aren't geared towards African pain? When I set out to write my book, I wanted to write a novel that documented the rot in publishing and how commercialisation of the post-colonial trauma trend has been to the detriment of not just the African reader but African writers as well.
There are few publications that document how publishing makes it impossible for African authors to have the same possibilities as their white counterparts.
This is a great book about a young writer's obsession with a scandalised author and the reasons behind the latter's disappearance. The writing has an incantational cadence that is truly stunning, and Sarr never relents in his critique of the unsavoury treatment of African authors by Western publishers.
Paris, 2018. Diegane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer, discovers a legendary book titled The Maze of Inhumanity. It has an immediate hold over him. No one knows what happened to the author, T.C. Elimane, who was accused of plagiarism, his reputation destroyed by the critics.
Obsessed with discovering the truth about Elimane's disappearance, Faye weaves past and present, countries and continents, following the author's labyrinthine trail from Senegal to Argentina and France and confronting the great tragedies of history.
Will he get to the truth at the centre of the maze?
A gripping literary quest novel and a masterpiece…
I'm passionate about stories that portray women as full human beings managing their passions, challenges, and obligations with grit because I grew up surrounded by a phalanx of them. Those who add “wife” and “mother” to their plate fascinate me all the more, especially as I grow older and better understand the pressures heaped on women. I saw my mother, sister, grandmothers, and aunties in all their complexities, building themselves up as they built families and businesses, starting over when they had to, overcoming the seemingly insurmountable, challenging the status quo, and never giving up. I gravitate toward female characters who share that spirit or grapple with how to get it.
I could not put this book down—and not just because it’s 90 pages long. The letter format instantly drew me into this candid conversation between two old friends grappling with the fallout of their upended marriages.
I love that Ramatoulaye shows no hint of judgment toward Aissatou about the different choices each woman made when faced with similar circumstances. I also appreciated Ramatoulaye’s frank reflections on her daughter’s opinion of her.
Written by Mariama Ba and translated from the French by Modupe Bode-Thomas, So Long a Letter won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, and was recognised as one of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century in an initiative organised by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. This edition includes an introduction by Professor Kenneth W. Harrow of Michigan State University.
When I was a university student, I wanted to know how African presidencies function, not only how African presidents acquire and keep power, but also how they imagine it, how they anticipate political battles, who they trust, and who they fear. All too often, the literature focuses on colonial legacy and neo-colonization and describes African presidents with too little agency. As a doctoral researcher, I stumbled on a biography of Jomo Kenyatta and got caught by the intricacies of his political career. Since then, Kenyan political history has become my area of specialization, and while my background in political science keeps inspiring me, I have a passion for historical writing.
This book stands as a reference when it comes to the early life of Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and it is one of the first biographies of an African president that I read. Beyond the extreme richness of this book, I have always been struck by how little the author wrote about Senghor’s political career as president (which remains quite controversial). For a long time, biographies of African presidents were grounded in an idea of greatness and exceptionality rather than unraveling political intricacies.
I was born in a Jamaican far-district just before independence. That historical fact is only one aspect of my in-between childhood. My daily imaginative fare was European fairy tales; my mother’s stories of growing up; and folktales, rife with plantation monsters, that my grand-uncle told. There was no distance between life and those tales: our life was mythic. The district people were poor. So they understood inexactitudes profoundly enough to put two and two together and make five. They worshipped integrity, and church was central. Inevitably, genre-crossing, “impossible” realities, and the many ways love interrupts history, were set in my imagination by the time I was seven and knew I would write.
For me, growing up in the Caribbean, books that don’t separate between the “naturalistic” world and so-called “other” worlds, always ring uniquely true. Gorée is a transnational story set in Castries, St. Lucia, New York City, USA, Dakar, Senegal, and London, England. It’s the story of a family whose great losses parallel the loss of Africa's children through the transatlantic slave trade and the difficult, if not impossible, return of those stolen away. The novel’s love and loss stories are all in some way are filtered through the door of no return on Gorée Island in Senegal. The stories are not told in the physical realm only and do not only rely on physical portals. Barry's loves and lovers must return to the past and make the journey in spirit too.
A contemporary portrait of estrangement, this novel explores the African diaspora and the encounters made by people of African descent as they journey from New York to London, St. Lucia, and Senegal. Traveling to Africa to meet her ex-husband’s new family, Magdalene and her daughter Khadi are brought face-to-face with the perils of forgotten pasts—both social and cultural. And when Khadi's trip to the slave port of Goree takes an unfavorable turn, certain divisions in global culture become evident, making this a powerful investigation into the continuing repercussions of the slave trade.
As a feminist academic and activist, I am personally committed to the cause of reproductive freedom. Professionally, I've spent the past seven years carrying out research on abortion pills and their travels around the globe. This research involved more than eighty interviews with activists and doctors across the world, as well as analysis of many different text sources. My work has also taken me into activist spaces across Europe, as a volunteer with the Abortion Support Network. Although I entered the topic of reproductive rights through my interest in abortion, reading widely in the field has led me to pursue research interests in reproductive and biomedical technologies in other areas of sexual and reproductive health.
Dying to Count offers the very best of academic writing: the book makes a complex but persuasive argument, based on richly detailed fieldwork in Senegal. It shows the human consequences of anti-abortion laws, but it moves well beyond describing the experiences of women seeking abortion or the dilemmas of their doctors.
Women experiencing spontaneous miscarriage often have the same symptoms as women with complications from illegal abortions, and they often need the same medical treatment. So where abortion is illegal, Suh shows, classifying an abortion as a miscarriage can give women access to essential medical treatment. However, it can also freeze bad laws and policies in place, dampening efforts to legalize safe abortion.
Suh’s book shows how the best social science analysis can illuminate a subject in so many ways – from stories of individual patients in Senegalese hospitals, testimony from doctors and health workers, analysis of national and international…
During the early 1990s, global health experts developed a new model of emergency obstetric care: post-abortion care or PAC. In developing countries with restrictive abortion laws and where NGOs relied on US family planning aid, PAC offered an apolitical approach to addressing the consequences of unsafe abortion. In Dying to Count, Siri Suh traces how national and global population politics collide in Senegal as health workers, health officials, and NGO workers strive to demonstrate PAC's effectiveness in the absence of rigorous statistical evidence that the intervention reduces maternal mortality. Suh argues that pragmatically assembled PAC data convey commitments to maternal…
I was passionate about anthropology in the 1970s when I was in my twenties and am still passionate about anthropology in the 2020s in my seventies. Throughout the years I have expressed my passion for anthropology in university classrooms, in public lectures, and in the 16 books I have published. As my mind has matured, I understand more and more fully just how important it is to write powerfully, cogently, and accessibly about the wisdom of others. In all my books I have attempted to convey to the public this fundamental wisdom, none more so than in my latest book, Wisdom from the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times.
Anna Badkhen, a writer of creative non-fiction and fiction, publishes lyrical descriptions of people, place, and character. She has written about social life in Afghanistan as well as the challenging lifeways of people in Mali and Senegal.
Fisherman’s Blues, which is situated in the artisan fishing village of Joal, Senegal, is an inspiring story that describes how Senegalese fishermen employ practical wisdom, passed down from generation to generation, to maintain their way of life in environmentally challenging times.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR AND PASTE MAGAZINE
An intimate account of life in a West African fishing village, tugged by currents ancient and modern, and dependent on an ocean that is being radically transformed.
The sea is broken, fishermen say. The sea is empty. The genii have taken the fish elsewhere.
For centuries, fishermen have launched their pirogues from the Senegalese port of Joal, where the fish used to be so plentiful a man could dip his hand into the grey-green ocean and pull one out as big as his thigh. But…
