Books by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Small Worlds
by Caleb Azumah Nelson
“Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson is a book about family, about music, about growing up in a Ghanaian family in South London—specifically, in Peckham. It’s very lyrical, it’s very tender. It has a wonderful eye for the idealism and vulnerability of youth. It’s also about growing up as a black Londoner and the challenges that even in the time it is set—in the early 2010s—still confronted any black kids in a community like that. Its political content is not strident. It’s not on the surface. It’s deeply embedded in the process of celebrating family life and, also, the music that for this character and for his friends represents a very specific kind of liberation. It’s about memory and freedom and the kinds of love that bind a community together and, for me, that’s certainly political enough.”
“When two unnamed twenty-somethings, a photographer and a dancer, lock eyes from across a crowded room, they find themselves irresistibly drawn to one another. Their subsequent relationship—intimate but undefinable—and artistic collaboration forms the basis of this intense and lyrical novel, which also serves as a meditation on the making of art, and the experience of being young and Black in modern Britain.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
Interviews where books by Caleb Azumah Nelson were recommended
The Best Novels of 2021, recommended by Cal Flyn
It’s been another vintage year for fiction. As book sales continue to soar, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn talks us through her personal highlights: the best new novels to be released in 2021. Her recommendations include a workplace comedy that unfolds through the medium of Slack, a “darkly sardonic” story of a 17th-century witch trial, and a witty novel-of-ideas examining trans parenthood.
The Best Political Novels of 2023, recommended by Boyd Tonkin
The Orwell Prizes are the UK’s most prestigious prizes for writing about politics, awarded annually to books and articles that best meet George Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art.” Boyd Tonkin, chair of this year’s judges, talks us through the books shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Notable Novels of Summer 2023, recommended by Cal Flyn
New novels are piling up ready for summer 2023—but which of them should go straight to the top of your reading list? Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of some of the most notable fiction titles of the season, including eagerly anticipated novels from Emma Cline and Naoise Dolan, plus a fictionalised account of the making of a blockbuster movie by Tom Hanks.
