Bookcase: Reviews of Girl A by Abigail Dean and How To Be A Refugee by Simon May droitwichstandard.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from droitwichstandard.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Katie Levers
A must read if you enjoyed The Beekeeper of Aleppo, and the devastation caused by social and cultural conflict and the effects it has on generations across continents.
I loved reading this book and discovering the injustice faced by Sameer, his friends and ancestors in the UK and Uganda. Uganda is a country I had no prior knowledge of but the author paints a picture of a place of beauty but also of societal and cultural upheaval. Relationships between family and friendships are so interwoven throughout the book that it sometimes seems they are all one, with the same injustices but continents and decades apart.
Features How I wrote it: Hafsa Zayyan on We Are All Birds of Uganda
Hafsa Zayyan managed to write her debut novel in six months, while working full time as a lawyer. Here the winner of the Merky Books New Writer’s Prize discusses the hours of research and late nights it took to produce her brilliant first book.
Weeks after publishing her debut novel, Hafsa Zayyan still considers her career as an author to be something “random and flukey”. The 29-year-old won a publishing contract after entering the first New Writer’s Prize from Merky Books on something of a whim, and ended up having to deliver an entire manuscript in six months – while working full-time as a dispute resolution lawyer.
Win a winter reading package with We Are All Birds of Uganda Competitions Win a winter reading package with We Are All Birds of Uganda
Order We Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan and you could win the perfect winter reading package! 18 January 2021
They go where they will.
If there’s one debut novel that needs to be on your radar this January it’s
We Are All Birds of Uganda. Written by the Hafsa Zayyan, the winner of the #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize, this story moves between two continents over a troubled century and is an immensely resonant novel that explores racial tensions, generational divides and what it means to belong.
When Hafsa Zayyan was a child she wrote letters to her paternal grandfather in Nigeria. He would send back a marked-up version of her letter, correcting its grammatical mistakes. “He didn’t realise