Litnet

"Before we hit the ground by Selali Fiamanya is a literary novel about migration, grief, memory, belonging and return. The narrative opens with a Ghanaian family in Scotland packing up a house after the death of their son, Elom. Rather than using bereavement as melodrama, Fiamanya presents grief as something embedded in ordinary life routines – the wiping of kitchen tiles, packing Tupperware, preserving photographs and deciding what belongs in storage, memory and the bin. The emotional restraint is one of the novel’s greatest strengths."

"South Africa’s recurring Afrophobic violence, meanwhile, is too often explained solely through the language of prejudice. That explanation is necessary, but insufficient."

"Perhaps that is why reading Homer after university felt less like discovering a foreign classic than recognising a distant relative for me. I was not entering an unfamiliar world. I was returning to one I had known all along."

"The occupation, he insists, is not merely administered through architecture and engineering, but is the architecture of conquest."

"Nuremberg succeeds as a courtroom drama and as an exploration of the psychology of evil. It is less successful as an examination of the broader political and nationalist currents that produced Nazi Germany."

"Land is among the finest historical novels of recent years: intellectually ambitious, emotionally resonant, politically alert and written with extraordinary grace. It confirms Maggie O’Farrell as one of the most accomplished novelists writing in English today."

"Viewed in its entirety, Mathe’s biography is ultimately a meditation on memory, political ownership and historical erasure."

"In many ways, this is not merely a historical novel about Taiwan under Japanese rule, but a novel about every colonised society where the coloniser arrives convinced of their own sophistication while remaining blind to the humanity standing beside them."

"It relies on recognisable structures of interpretation: the compromised genius, the corrupt system, the haunted past, the faithful wife who outlasts everything. These are presented with intelligence and elegance, but also with a certain complacency, as if their truth were self-evident tropes that need no further interrogation."

"The image is almost too apt, which may be why Jill Lepore, never innocent of the well-placed metaphor, places it at the conceptual centre of We the People, her Pulitzer Prize-winning history of 2026."

"What you are left with, finally, is an accumulation of atmosphere: lives conducted partly in the open and partly in concealment; stories moving across continents and decades; a writer who converts experience into fiction; and a woman who must inhabit the afterlife of that transformation."

"If earlier films sought to explain Winnie, this one insists that explanation will always be inadequate when confronting a character of such magnitude, or a period of such intensity. As a work of rigorous, morally serious documentary filmmaking, it demands moral engagement rather than passive consumption. For anyone interested in South African history, political memory and the ethics of liberation, it is essential viewing."

"This is not a novel that wants you to feel comfortable, and its structure won’t let you, either."

"The bittereinder dying of typhoid in a Bloemfontein camp and the black child buried without a name in a Free State field are not statistics in a structural argument; they are the argument. A curriculum that cannot make a schoolchild feel the weight of those deaths in their own chest has failed at its most essential task."

"This essay concerns itself with a recurring structure in Western historical consciousness: the production of fear as a precondition for domination. Fear, in this tradition, is rarely spontaneous. It is cultivated, narrativised and subsequently moralised until it acquires the character of providence."