Greetings, readers! My name is Sareeta Domingo, and I’m an author and fiction editor. It’s my great pleasure to be bringing you a Book of the Week, each week here on Morning Mari.
 
This will, however, be my last Book of the Week on Worldwide FM for a while, as the Morning Mari show will be taking a little break soon. But my recommendation this week is a story that really celebrates the importance of music in the incredible way this radio station does—so my Book of the Week this week is a novel published only a few weeks ago, Dawnie Walton’s fantastic The Final Revival of Opal and Nev.
 
The book is entirely fictional, but that is often really quite hard to believe, which is a testament to the skill of this debut author. It follows the story of the titular musical duo, Opal and Nev, and it’s written in the style of an oral history, featuring talking-head style interviews with several of the major players in Opal and Nev’s journey from the late sixties and early seventies to the present day. Nev Charles is a British singer songwriter, whose career initially picks up when he’s paired with an incredibly striking proto-punk goddess in the form of tall, dark, bald and beautiful African American singer Opal Jewel. However, in the course of this story documenting their rise to success, we learn of the Altamont-style gig that’s at the heart of a dark turn in Opal and Nev’s musical careers and personal lives.
 
Walton has pieced together this novel with an incredibly keen ear, presenting the narrative through snippets of interviews with the musicians and music industry people that were key to the story. But she’s made it even more engaging through the fact that the character of the journalist putting this book-within-a-book together has a personal stake in Opal and Nev’s story. And using the real musical and socio-political climate of 1960s and 70s America as the novel’s backdrop, Walton has created characters who, while fictional, couldn’t feel more genuine as ciphers for the racial tensions of that era, and of today. She also writes with a clear understanding and deep love for music that will appeal to anyone who, like me, is enamoured of an amazing story and of incredible music.
 
It’s a novel that’s so well put together and evocative that you might find yourself futilely digging in the stacks to find Opal and Nev’s records. Instead, hopefully you’ll be drawn to seek out the other pioneering figures of that era of music, especially from Black female rock stars like Betty Davis and Nona Hendryx. As much as anything, the book is really a love story to those rock goddesses. And that is why the electrifying The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton is my Book of the Week this week.

Greetings, readers! My name is Sareeta Domingo, and I’m an author and fiction editor. It’s my great pleasure to be bringing you a Book of the Week, each week here on Morning Mari.
 
Despite writing romantic storylines quite a bit as an author, I don’t often come across other romantic novels that really nail everything I’m looking for in a story in that genre—representation, chemistry, sexiness and emotional depth. However, my Book of the Week this week is one I’ve selected because it does everything that I’m looking for! So this week, my Book of the Week is Tia Williams’ delectable 2016 novel The Perfect Find.
 
The novel follows Jenna Jones, a formerly high-flying magazine editor who, at the start of the story, finds herself humbled into a new, lesser job at a webzine, run by a woman who’s Jenna’s former arch nemesis. Having been dumped by her fiancé and fired from her last job, Jenna’s not in a position to be picky, and just entering her 40s, she struggles a bit with things like social media and current trends, having been out of action for a while. But when she meets sexy Eric Combs at a party and has a steamy encounter with him, things get even more complex when he turns out not only be a new colleague, but almost half her age.
 
The set up of the story might seem like any run of the mill rom com, but this book feels different. Tia Williams’ focus on African American characters who aren’t directly contending with trauma or struggle is a refreshing relief, and rather unusually, the book centres an older female protagonist and her younger beau, but without falling into cliché or predictability. Jenna and Eric’s relationship unfolds with a delicious sexiness that doesn’t ignore the very real challenges these two characters will face. Williams writes with a zippy but astute touch that really draws you in as a reader, with genuinely witty lines and emotional scenes.
 
It’s absolutely no surprise that actor Gabrielle Union is soon to make this into a film for Netflix, and I’ll definitely be looking out for it when it drops. But for now, I really encourage you to sink into this romantic novel, which is full of real fizz and depth. That is why The Perfect Find by Tia Williams is my Book of the Week this week.

Greetings, readers! My name is Sareeta Domingo, and I’m an author and fiction editor. It’s my great pleasure to be bringing you a Book of the Week, each week here on Morning Mari.
 
One of my favourite films is Peter Weir’s underrated 1993 gem Fearless, starring Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez. The film’s screenplay was adapted by an author from his own novel of the same name, and I’ve always been keen to read the source material. Recently I finally managed to do so, and I was richly rewarded. So my Book of the Week this week is Rafael Yglesias’ all-consuming, devastating and incredible novel, Fearless.
 
The book begins with a stunningly immersive and scarily visceral description of a plane crash, which is absolutely not for the faint of heart. But through these scenes, we’re introduced to the book’s two central characters. Max is an architect in his early forties, flying back from a business trip with the co-owner of his firm. Carla is a young mother who is flying with her two-year-old son, whom she affectionately calls Bubble. It’s hopefully not too much of a spoiler to say that Max’s business partner and Carla’s son both unfortunately die when the plane crash lands en route to its destination in New York.
 
While Max and Carla, along with around half of the other passengers, survive the crash, the two main protagonists deal with the situation in different ways. Carla is understandably devastated by the loss of her child, and spirals into a despondent state of despair that her frustrated husband and mother struggle to shake her out of. Max, meanwhile, reaches an almost existential state of calm, with a sense that he’s almost invulnerable to danger or death, frustrating his family in a different way. His new stance on his life is stark, and laced with humour as well as a disturbing sense of dread, while Carla’s utter grief is completely heart-rending.
 
Yglesias writes the perspective of both characters beautifully, and when they come together in the final third of the book, the effect is exhilarating. Max and Carla are almost the only people one another can understand, and together, the notion of what it means to have ‘passed through death’, as Max suggests, is made manifest. Carla is pulled out of her devastation, and Max is brought back to appreciating existence in a different way. As Yglesias writes of Max very end of the book, “I’m alive, he rejoiced. I’m alive. And I’m afraid.”
 
The book teaches us that such fear is a vital part of appreciating life. It’s wonderfully well written and truly original. I highly recommend seeking it out, and that is why Fearless by Rafael Yglesias is my Book of the Week this week.

Greetings, readers! My name is Sareeta Domingo, and I’m an author and fiction editor. It’s my great pleasure to be bringing you a Book of the Week, each week here on Morning Mari.
 
In the last few days here in London, it’s felt like we’ve experienced all the seasons at once. So it seemed appropriate for my Book of the Week this week to be Manjit Thapp’s recent graphic novel, Feelings: A Story in Seasons. However, that’s the least of the reasons to pick up this gorgeous book.
 
In it, Thapp charts the journey of one young woman’s “seasonal experiences with anxiety”, moving through the positivity and hopefulness of the height of summer, and cycling gradually into darker, more introspective and listless feelings as autumn slips into winter—and then back again.
 
The expression of the character’s inner feelings working in tandem with the weather outside is done in a way that is intensely relatable and beautifully rendered through Thapp’s stunning illustration style. I don’t often read graphic novels, but books like this really do demonstrate how resonant it can be to pair economical words with careful, stunning imagery. It can definitely evoke as much reflection and interest as a lengthy novel, as demonstrated in this book. The challenge our protagonist faces in trying to find a balance in terms of her friendships and relationships, a sense of motivation in her artistic endeavours, as well as attempting to stay engaged in her day job at work, is rendered in a way that will easily find resonance with almost anyone who reads this book.
 
As we move into spring time, with all of its sense of potential for rebirth, reinvention and the possibility of new beginnings, Feelings: A Story in Seasons is the perfect book to take a moment to reflect. It would also make a stunning gift, as Thapp’s illustrations really are gorgeous. That is why Feelings: A Story in Seasons by Manjit Thapp, is my Book of the Week this week.

Greetings, readers! My name is Sareeta Domingo, and I’m an author and fiction editor. It’s my great pleasure to be bringing you a Book of the Week, each week here on Morning Mari.
 
It’s the first of April, a date for jokes and pranks perhaps, but also a date that means we’re heading well and truly into Spring, and also headed for a few days of break for Easter. All of these things, in my mind, call for a fun read that is also not devoid of substance—so my Book of the Week this week is Emily Henry’s engrossing romance novel, Beach Read.
 
The story follows January Andrews, a romantic fiction author going though a dry spell of writing that is initially not helped by the discovery, at her father’s funeral, that he’d had a double life of sorts. It turns out he had an ongoing lover in the beach town where he’d grown up, despite also sticking with January’s ailing mother—who, it turns out knew about the affair. January goes to pack up the beach house that her father had shared with this other woman, and discovers that her neighbour there is Gus Everett, a man she went to college with who has now become a wildly successful so-called ‘literary’ author in his own right. He’s also someone she had an inconvenient crush on, which is rekindled when the two begin to exchange sparky, funny banter with the chance to interact again in the present day. They wind up challenging each other to try writing their next novels in one another’s genre—Gus is to write a romantic story, and January is to write something darker and less optimistic than her usual fare. The two find that not only is their mutual creativity stimulated by this challenge, but, of course, they also find themselves pulled deeper into attraction, and even love.
 
The book reads like a perfect, sassy, savvy romantic comedy, layered with emotion that not only stems from the love story that unfolds at its centre. We also understand a great deal about the grief and confusion January faces at trying to reconcile the family life she thought was one thing, but turns out to have been something else, and there is a palpable depth to the manner in which she and Gus connect. It’s all testament to the three dimensional nature of the way Emily Henry has crafted these characters, but more than anything, this book is the perfect romantic read that you’ll devour, say, in a few days of (hopeful) sunshine over a short break. That is why Beach Read by Emily Henry is my Book of the Week this week.

Greetings, readers! My name is Sareeta Domingo, and I’m an author and fiction editor. It’s my great pleasure to be bringing you a Book of the Week, each week here on Morning Mari.
 
This week, my Book of the Week is an engrossing, prescient and bang-up-to-the minute collection of essays exploring what it means to be a Black woman in the modern west—Kenya Hunt’s Girl: Essays on Black Womanhood.
 
A renowned fashion journalist hailing from the USA, Hunt has largely made her home here in the UK, but this collection is fascinating, as much as anything, for the manner in which her outsider status highlights so many of the commonalities, as well as some of the differences involved, in being a Black woman in the global African diaspora.
 
In many of the essays featured in this collection, Hunt movingly explores the challenges we as Black women face in terms of medical healthcare, particularly in regard to motherhood. She also explores some of the stereotypes and expectations placed on us in terms of how we’re expected to carry ourselves in the workplace, or in relation to a society that often presents us with difficulties when it comes to beauty standards. She’s ably assisted in these topics with guest essays from writers such as Candice Carty-Williams and Freddy Harrell, and I was particularly struck by women’s rights activist and poet, Jessica Horn’s, moving essay on her work in eastern Congo and African feminism. But the majority of the pieces in the book are written by Hunt herself, in a style whose accessibility belies her background in staple women’s publications like Grazia magazine.
 
However, it is very clear that Hunt is not interested in simply writing palatable or assimilationist essays in this collection. Much like the introduction’s exploration of the many iterations of the word ‘girl’ among Black women, I felt like this was a collection that spoke directly to me and my own background. But it’s also an important book for absolutely any of those seeking an important contemporary take on modern Black womanhood. That is why Girl: Essays on Black Womanhood by Kenya Hunt is my Book of the Week, this week.

Greetings, readers! My name is Sareeta Domingo, and I’m an author and fiction editor. It’s my great pleasure to be bringing you a Book of the Week, each week here on Morning Mari.
 
It’s an unfortunate truth that although we’re in the midst of Women’s History Month, the last couple of weeks in the UK news cycle have highlighted many of the vulnerabilities faced by women even in modern day society. That is in many ways the subject of my Book of the Week selection this week—Kate Elizabeth Russell’s powerful novel My Dark Vanessa.
 
The book centres on Vanessa Wyes, who at fifteen years of age is groomed into an abusive sexual relationship with her middle-aged teacher, Jacob Strane, while at a prestigious boarding school. We see how the impact of this interaction has a lasting impact on Vanessa throughout her later teen years and into her twenties.
 
Through unflinching, immersive narrative, Russell builds an all-too-believable portrait of a girl whose vulnerability and intelligence is preyed upon by a man who manipulates her into believing she may even be responsible for the situation in which she finds herself. The story is at many turns difficult to read, but is also a mark of the author’s skill at creating a complicated portrait of her central character. As we move between Vanessa’s teenage years, and into her adulthood, we’re willing her to understand the reality of how she’s been mentally and physically controlled, and to find a cathartic release from the emotional prison in which she’s been trapped.
 
My Dark Vanessa is certainly not a book that could be classed as a light read, but it’s genuinely compelling and really draws you in. We’re able to understand—even if Vanessa initially can’t see it—how the predatory behaviour of men like the character of Jacob Strane can be facilitated by those around him, and how damaging that behaviour can be. But ultimately, we’re also introduced to a realistic, three-dimensional young woman through whose character we are able to find some rays of hope. It’s a powerful, often shocking, but hugely gripping read, and one that I highly recommend. That is why My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell is my Book of the Week, this week.

Greetings, readers! My name is Sareeta Domingo, and I’m an author and fiction editor. It’s my great pleasure to be bringing you a Book of the Week, each week here on Morning Mari.
 
This week, my Book of the Week is a searingly honest and emotional exploration of what it means to raise a child of diasporic heritage in Britain today: Nikesh Shukla’s Brown Baby: A Memoir of Family, Race and Home. In the book, Shukla addresses his young daughters directly, in the manner of a letter or a soul-searching conversation—one that is perhaps most easily facilitated by putting thoughts down on a page. He interrogates the numerous challenges of parenthood in a manner that is by turns very specific to his own experiences, but shot thought with a sense of urgent truth that is all too relatable to those of us from global majority backgrounds navigating life in the UK.
 
In deceptively skilful, direct prose, Shukla explores the trials and the overwhelming beauty of finding oneself responsible for the care of another helpless human being. How it can chip away at one’s own identity, and how it can also recraft a person into a new form—one with a greater understanding of the fundamentals of existing in the world. Particularly, in a world that, despite the hubris of empire, now ofeten views us with suspicion and rejection. This memoir lays bare the bone-deep hurt of racism, and the complexities of shaping racial and cultural identity in the face of it.
 
But Brown Baby also explores Shukla’s own deeply personal experience of loss, and how his mother’s death has affected his perceptions of parenthood, as well as the way grief has manifested in his sometimes-unhealthy relationship to food. He explores, with wit and rectitude, how his upbringing has shaped his notions of career and creativity.
 
It’s a beautiful memoir that is deeply relatable on so many levels, even if, like me, you aren’t a parent yourself. That is why Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home by Nikesh Shukla, is my Book of the Week this week.

Greetings, readers! My name is Sareeta Domingo, and I’m an author and fiction editor. It’s my great pleasure to be bringing you a Book of the Week, each week here on Morning Mari.
 
My selection this week is potentially a little bit indulgent, but I hope you’ll allow me, because it features not only my own writing, but that of nine other incredible British women authors. My Book of the Week this week is Who’s Loving You: Love Stories by Women of Colour, an anthology of romantic stories created & edited by me, publishing TODAY!
 
I conceived this project as a way to redress the dearth of romance fiction written by people from global majority backgrounds, as well as my desire to commission work from some of my absolute favourite British women writing today. It’s been a genuine labour of love—if you’ll pardon the pun—to put this collection of short stories together, and it’s been such a joy to work on.
 
There truly is a love story here for everyone. Kelechi Okafor writes of twin flame souls drawn together over the centuries. Varaidzo’s tale connects two lonely women with the help of technology and time. Sara Collins explores a forbidden connection that leads back to home. Amna Saleem links a grandmother’s love-life with a second chance at romance for her granddaughter. Sara Jafari explores love as a way out of grief in modern Iran. Kuchenga’s epistolary tale depicts a man’s love for his intended laid bare. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan weaves a tale of deep human emotion surfacing through the creation of sentient appliances. Daniellé DASH portrays a heroine whose dark past galvanises her into manifesting happiness in a new romance. Dorothy Koomson’s sees yearning turn to destiny as two friends are drawn into the love that was always between them. And my own story is one of love, perseverance and the enduring will of fate.
This anthology provides a perfect escape into a multitude of romantic tales, and that is why Who’s Loving You: Love Stories by Women of Colour, conceived and edited by me, Sareeta Domingo, is my Book of the Week this week!

Greetings, readers! My name is Sareeta Domingo, and I’m an author and fiction editor. It’s my great pleasure to be bringing you a Book of the Week, each week here on Morning Mari.
 
As a teenager, movies were definitely a way for me to escape into worlds outside my own—but there was one film that somehow felt like a perfect embodiment of the feeling of being in those formative years on the cusp of adulthood. Richard Linklater’s classic Dazed & Confused, released in 1993 but set on the last day of high school in a Texas town in 1976 shouldn’t have felt like it had anything in common with my own teenage-hood growing up as an expat in the Middle East decades after the time period of the film. And yet, the feeling it evoked—the excitement and possibility of being that age, the heightened sense of wanting to belong, the importance of music and freedom—are all beautifully captured in the movie.
 
So my Book of the Week this week is Melissa Maerz’s book, Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. It delves, in admirable detail, into the behind-the-scenes creation of the movie. The book was for me a hugely welcome reminder of just how much Dazed & Confused meant to me as a film. Maerz had crafted a painstaking oral history of the making of the film, tracking down hundreds of the actors, producers, hangers-on and inspirations behind Linklater’s sophomore film.
 
It’s a truly engrossing exploration both of the process of making a film like this, as well as the unique experience so many of those who participated had. Linklater went from an indie upstart to creating a film within the studio system that still somehow hung onto the sensibilities he’d come up on. Many of the cast, like Ben Affleck and Matthew McConnaughey, whose iconic greeting forms the book’s title, went on to become big stars. But it’s striking how much Maerz’s book, crafted into an oral history through interspersed interviews, exposes that it wasn’t just on screen that a feeling of being in a truly special time was captured. Behind the scenes, so many of the actors clearly still view the making of the film as a truly formative time for them personally too, even decades later.
 
The book is a fascinating account of filmmaking in the early nineties, as a unique insight into Linklater’s formative years, as well as a cleverly structured and diligently researched book, in which the author has utilised her passion for her subject to craft a compelling documentary on the page. I highly recommend it even if you’re not a superfan of the film. That’s why Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed & Confused is my Book of the Week this week!