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.
 
So here we are at the tail end of this year, and my final book recommendation for 2020. It feels like a cliché now to reference just how turbulent this year has been globally, but what it has emphasised to me, as much as anything, is that you can never predict what is around the corner. However, much more significantly, it’s shown the importance of holding tight to the very concept of possibility. With that in mind, my last Book of the Week selection this year is one dedicated to that concept: For Every One by Jason Reynolds.
 
Reynolds is a prolific and multi-award-winning poet and author, primarily for young readers. However, For Every One is just that—a book for everybody. It’s a short, poetic piece written in the form of a letter, but it’s truly an amorphous meditation on motivation; a mantra that could be repeated—and read—again and again.
 
Written in bursts that are beautifully laid out on the page, the book describes both Reynolds own ambitions and the difficulties he faces in aiming to attain them—but it also reaches out with its words to us as readers, willing us on, supporting our struggles, and emphasising the importance of relishing in the act of striving. It is a piece of writing that is not necessarily about the destination of a dream, but the journey to it. For Every One is a book that’s sure to motivate any and all of us who have endured the tumbles and bumps of this unprecedented year, and I’d say it would make a wonderful gift. All we have to remember is that this has just been one stop along the way. As Reynolds writes: Dreams don’t have timelines, deadlines, and aren’t always in straight lines.
 
So, here’s to our dreams for the journey to come, and that’s why For Every One by Jason Reynolds 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 selection is a magnificently original memoir by writer and poet Yrsa Daley-Ward: The Terrible. The title of the book is apt in some ways, because, as she writes “God, there were terrible things” that happened to the author along the course of her life as a child and into early adulthood. She documents these things in a truly unique manner, straddling prose and poetry in short bursts of text that are economical, lyrical and striking.
 
Daley-Ward grew up in the northwest of England, initially with her beautiful Jamaican mother, Marcia and her beloved younger brother whom she calls Little Roo. Her Nigerian father was absent from their lives, and as she reaches puberty and gains unwanted attention form Marcia’s boyfriend, she’s shipped off to live with her strict, Seventh Day Adventist grandparents.
 
The book explores Daley-Ward’s burgeoning sexuality and how she attempts to navigate it as she grows older and moves away from home. This journey is empowering in ways, but also lays out dark, haunted passages that hint at deeper struggles. We see how the author grapples with how she’s viewed, particularly in physical terms, in the modelling industry, by her mother, by men and by herself—and how this impacts her mental health.
 
The text of the book itself is often experimentally laid out on the page, belying Daley-Ward’s engagement with the pithy Instagram posts that made her name as a poet. She has a truly wonderful sense of self-creation, of language delivery, and of creativity and writing itself. As she writes at the book’s conclusion: It takes six moments to write a thing. 1) you dream 2) you wake up 3) you sit down 4) you settle on the chair/bed/floor 5) you think what is happening? is this the day nothing’ll come? Is this the end of it? 6) then you grip your  heart, involuntarily and your soul comes up. Your soul comes up, I’m telling you.
 
 In this book, we truly see the author’s soul laid bare on the page. And that is why The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward 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.

Recently, I’ve been seeing some mesmerising teaser trailers circulating the internet for the incredible director Barry Jenkins’ next project—a limited television series which will be an adaptation of a truly brilliant book. So, I thought I would make it my Book of the Week selection for this week—Colson Whitehead’s astounding, Pulitzer Prize Winning 2016 novel The Underground Railroad.

The novel is set in the 19th Century in the United States. It focuses on Cora, an enslaved young woman who is an outcast on the plantation where she is forced to work, due to the fact that her mother, Mabel, escaped and left her behind. When fellow enslaved man Ceasar makes a plan to escape, he and Cora find their way out with the help of the Underground Railroad. While in reality, this was the term for a secret network of houses and clandestine routes to free states, and to Canada, in Whitehead’s novel the Underground Railroad is reimagined as an actual, physical rail transport system.

The story follows Cora and Ceasar’s dangerous, epic journey, the various places they arrive at or are forced to hide in, and the people they meet in dark, empathetic and sometimes tragic circumstances. All the while, they are being hunted by the evil so-called slave-catcher, Ridgeway, who is seeking vengeance for Mabel, the only enslaved person he’s been unable to capture.

The book is compelling and brilliantly written, with one of the most emotionally devastating twists I’ve ever read. But ultimately, the novel is a story of hope against impossible odds, and with the character of Cora at its heart we’re constantly willing her to succeed and so truly thankful for each victory, small and large, that she achieves. As Whitehead writes near the conclusion of the story – She Was Never Property. The novel is a truly staggering literary achievement, and that is why The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 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.

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to be invited onto a TV show to talk about books, which was a total delight. But as a lovely make-up artist came over to powder us during each break, making sure we were looking our best, I was reminded of a truly enthralling novel I read earlier this year. So, I’ve decided to make it my Book of the Week selection this week. It’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

The book is a deliciously glamorous story set mainly in the world of Old Hollywood. However, it starts in the present day, with struggling journalist Monique Grant, who is on the verge of giving up her dead end career and in the midst of breaking up with her husband. Out of the blue, she’s given the story of a lifetime when 79-year-old former movie star Evelyn Hugo agrees to an interview with the magazine where she works—and insists that Monique is the one to profile her.

Evelyn Hugo reveals that she actually wants Monique to document her entire life story, and so the novel dips back into the past, with the movie star recounting her story to Monique—and therefore to us as readers—from her humble beginnings as teenage bride, to shedding her true, Latina heritage to become an actress, and on through her rise to iconic movie-star status through the 1950s and 60s in the classic Hollywood era. And, of course, documenting each of the seven husbands she weds along the way.

The book is wonderfully constructed, and although the story is entirely fictional, Reid pulls on the biographies of classic stars such as Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor to create Evelyn Hugo’s rollercoaster of a story, which touches beautifully on issues of feminism and sexuality alongside the glamour of the era, and with a present-day twist that keeps the reader dying to know where the novel will end up. It sparkles with razzle dazzle and heartbreak, and it’s a perfect book to snuggle up with as the nights draw in. That is why The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid 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.

We’re already edging to halfway through the penultimate month of the year, but there’s something special that occurs in November that has inspired my Book of the Week selection this week. It’s National Novel Writing Month, also known as Nanowrimo! Nanowrimo is a yearly challenge which encourages people to try and write fifty thousand words of a novel in one month—for the maths whizzes among you, that’s a rate of one thousand six hundred and sixty seven words per day. It’s by no means an easy task, but I’m utilising the month to kick off a new novel of my own (I’m not necessarily on target for 50k by the 30th, but hey!). So I thought I’d recommend a fantastic book for inspiring the imagination of any storyteller—Wonderbook: An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff Vandermeer.

As you can tell from the title, the book is intended as both an instruction manual and also a source of inspiration for writers. There are tons of books about the art of storytelling and novel writing out there, but Vandermeer has created a resource that really does spark the imagination. It’s chock full of hundreds of drawings and illustrations rendered in glossy colour, designed to help simulate your ideas, as well as genuinely useful detailed advice about crafting stories. It discusses a range of ideas, from point of view, to dialogue, how to start and end your story, shaping your characters and so much more. But rather than a dry, stale textbook, Wonderbook has something unusual, laughter-inducing and always creative on every single page. It’s also full of fun exercises that can help spark off ideas if you’re blocked.

Nanowrimo is a chance for everyone who feels they have a novel inside them to give it a go, but even if you’re not quite there yet, this excellent book will give you space to gestate and create the stories inside you. And that is why Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff Vandermeer 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 selection is a recently-published autobiography by one of the preeminent singer-songwriters of the last two decades, Mariah Carey. While Ms Carey may be looked upon by some as an insubstantial recording artist, you’d A) be completely and utterly wrong, and B) you’d be hard pressed to find many other singers whose style has influenced almost all RnB singers of the last twenty years. So this week, my Book of the Week selection is Mariah’s utterly delicious memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey.

While the book was co-written with journalist Michaela Angela Davis, this is by no means a ghost-written puff piece. It truly feels imbued with Mariah’s essence, and I highly recommend the audiobook for Mariah’s wonderful performance of the work, including bursting periodically into song in her trademark breathy-to-powerful melismatic style. But you’re also treated to snippets such as the dry audio of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s ground-breaking cameo on her classic song Fantasy, preluded by a burst of Mariah rhapsodising about her love for Wu-Tang Clan. It’s amazing!

However, the predominant theme of the book is Mariah’s upbringing, which was tumultuous to say the least. It details the difficulties she felt in growing up a bi-racial girl in 1970s Long Island, New York, and how her childhood struggles, especially in regard to her race, affected her long into adult life. It’s a fascinating and very emotional story, and she also takes us behind the curtain—or perhaps as she might frame it, behind the bars—of her controlling marriage to famed record exec Tommy Mottola.

But most of all, we get a portrait of one of the most influential talents of our times, getting to understand the pressures of her type of fame. The insight into her writing process is truly fascinating, and her genuinely moving and beautiful lyrics are highlighted throughout the book. People sometimes joke about Mariah Carey is always reminding interviewers that she wrote all of her multi-award winning, record-smashing songs, but it bears emphasis. Mariah is a writer, first and foremost, and this book is testament to the fact. That is why The Meaning of Mariah Carey by Mariah Carey with Micheala Angela Davis, 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.
Living in London, we’re all used to the iconic image of the red busses snaking through the city’s roads. But as the global pandemic continues, being on public transport feels like a risk and an indulgence, and as I look out of the windows of my flat—as much as I’m glad safety is being observed—it still feels unusual to see passengers spaced out and wearing masks.

So this week, my Book of the Week selection is a unique and compelling debut novel, cleverly set entirely on a fictional East London bus route over the course of a mere 36 minutes: The 392 by Ashley Hickson-Lovence.

The book is told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of a cross-section of Londoners typical of the varied and vivid characters that intersect on public transport. There’s pregnant teenager Natalie; ironically near-blind racist football supporter Ray; Levi, who started out as a so-called criminal and is now inhabiting his own ironic about-turn as a barrister. There’s Irish widow Gloria who is contemplating the downhill slide of her latter years, and there’s also a parody-like portrait of politician Barney, who is filming a puff piece on board the bus who has a familiar air about him, if a somewhat surprising inner-life.

But there’s also a skilfully seeded brewing tension and dread about one of the other passengers and the bulky bag he’s carrying, that feeds into the particular existential threat that used to be pervasive in our minds before the novel coronavirus hit this year—that of terroristic threats against our modes of traversing this city.

Hickson-Lovence delves into the minds of disparate characters admirably, and plays on the anticipation and concern that our suspicions—and those of the passengers—will be met, using the novel to explore themes of prejudice, gentrification, fate and the sense of camaraderie that can spring up between seemingly disparate people. It’s a smart and engrossing novel that evokes London so tangibly, and that is why The 392 by Ashley Hickson-Lovence 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 I read an incredible novel that I’ve had near the top of my to-be-read pile for a long time, and instantly I knew it had to be my Book of the Week selection this week—Freshwater by Nigerean author Akwaeke Emezi.

The book is a stunningly unique auto-fiction closely based on the author’s own life. It tells the story of Ada, a child whose experience of the world is narrated from the perspectives of the gods or sprits who reside within her. Ada is described as an ogbanje, a term within Igbo culture that describes a spirit that is reincarnated repeatedly in the form of a troubled child—though that doesn’t encapsulate the whole story. We follow Ada’s life from a tumultuous childhood through to a young womanhood that is marred by sexual assault, and on into an adulthood plagued by self-harm and rootlessness.

But rather than a traditional narrative, Ada’s story is told sometimes by the collective ‘we’ of all the spirits residing inside her, and sometimes taken over by the more sexual spirit of Asughara, or the nurturing spirit known as Saint Vincent. These multitudinous ‘selves’ are in dialogue within Ada’s mind and can control her body, but ultimately the story is one that explores and challenges notions of physical and spiritual existence.

As the novel comes to its conclusion, we see Ada come into a self-acceptance that rejects binaries of gender and the confines of the body, in much the same way that the author identifies as transgender, non-binary and non-human. As they write at the book’s conclusion: ‘It was difficult to accept not being human but still being contained in a human body… Ogbanje are as liminal as is possible—spirit and human, both and neither.’ The book is a stunning examination of what it means to come to terms with existing in that powerful realm in between. And that is why Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi 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 feels like hardly a week goes by without there being a controversy that’s dissected, argued over and dismissed on social media. It’s often the first place I learn about breaking news, but it can also be a source of misinformation, and a stunning lack of nuanced dialogue. So my pick for this week is a non-fiction title published earlier this year—Outrage: Why Everyone is Shouting and No one is Talking by Ashley ‘Dotty’ Charles, the brilliant broadcaster, who, with this witty debut, has also made a first foray as a writer.

In the book, Charles argues that the volume of outrage that sizzles from the fingers of social media users is often simply a means of virtue-signalling, or bandwagon jumping, and can divert attention from the true injustices at the heart of an issue. She even goes so far as to interview the sources of much online vitriol, for greater or lesser reasons, speaking to Rachel Dolezal, the American former NAACP activist who had been passing as Black while having exclusively white heritage, as well as renowned hate-monger Katie Hopkins. In the latter’s case, Charles makes the argument that outrage simply acts as fuel for attention, and amplification of negativity.

Despite skewering the lazy activism – or ‘clicktivism’ – that often takes place on social media, it’s heartening to see how Charles also explores the possibility for real change to come about through online activism – for example, highlighting the work of Stop Funding Hate, who successfully campaign for advertising to be pulled from the pages of publications that feature prejudiced or hateful content.

The book showcases the author’s sense of inquisitiveness, which is shot through with equally high amounts of intelligence and humour. Outrage is a book that speaks to our times, and will lead you to question how you utilise your voice on social media – and off it. That is why Outrage: Why Everyone is Shouting and No one is Talking by Ashley ‘Dotty’ Charles, is my Book of the Week this week.