Roaring 20s Radio: book recommendations
Presented by author Salena Godden, art journalist Amah-Rose Abrams and poet Matt Abbot, Roaring 20s Radio amplifies the best art and culture, books and poetry, music and activism, as we collectively roar through the unprecedented events of this tumultuous decade.
Today I’m sharing some Roaring 20s Radio book recommendations.
This post is made to compliment a post made my co-host and poetry comrade Matt Abbott - read his wonderful selection of poetry books and events → here
Roaring 20s Radio has a new slot, a lively LIVE show airing on Monday afternoon's once a month on Soho Radio. We launched our show and podcasts back in November 2019 and kept going, making regular monthly shows all through the Covid lockdowns, and just recorded our July edition this week with special guest, writer and activist, Bridget Minamore.
You can listen via Soho Radio → www.sohoradio.com
On Roaring 20s Radio we try our best to share a brilliant and diverse mix of new discoveries, bold new voices, exciting indie outsiders, and some of the more mainstream big names too. When choosing books for these lists, I often boost writers that I meet on my adventures, at poetry events and book festivals, and I also select hot books to preorder from my towering proof piles. Roaring 20s Radio champions poets and indie publishers, artists and writers that are smashing through the silence, that shine a light on the here and now, there are so many courageous people and organisations that we include and love and admire.
Check out the 2025 book lists in my bookshop → Bookshop.org
Always happy to hear suggestions, so please do comment below with your favourite books of the year so far, or with any writers you would like to hear us feature and interview. Hopefully there will be something for everyone here, I’m sharing a mix of light and dark, hope and shadow, plenty of inspiration and soul nourishment. Happy reading, happy writing, see you at the protests, see you at the festivals, see you in the bookshops, see you in real life real soon,
BIGlove Xx
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - Omar El Akkad
This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today. As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West offered freedom and justice for all. Over the past twenty years he reported on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more. He won awards for his journalism and his fiction. But now, watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he comes to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. This powerful book is a chronicle of Omar's painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means - as a citizen, as a father - to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times. This is a book for those that have tired of moral emptiness. This is a book for everyone who wants something better.
The Emperor of Gladness - Ocean Vuong
One summer evening in the town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond. When Hai takes a job at a diner to support himself and Grazina, his fellow workers become the family he didn’t expect to find. United by desperation and circumstance, and existing on the fringes of society, together they bear witness to each other’s survival. This is an unforgettable story of unexpected friendship and how far people go to find a second chance.
Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History - Emma Warren
In Up the Youth Club, Emma Warren maps the shifting story of youth clubs in the UK and Northern Ireland, from factory workers in Victorian Boys' and Girls' clubs to renegade self-emancipatory spaces in the 1970s and the music-generating youth clubs of more recent decades. With a mixed lineage in church evangelism, the patronage of the upper classes, grassroots' DIY, and erratic state funding, the youth club has had a huge, yet almost invisible, effect on music, sport, culture and society. With this impassioned history, Warren invites us to pick up the torch and play an active part in protecting and re-igniting this vital part of UK society.
Preorder available now, published September 11 with Faber
The Catch - Yrsa Daley Ward
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life. Clara, a celebrity author in desperate need of validation, believes Serene is their mother, while Dempsey, isolated and content to remain so, believes she is a con woman. As they clash over this stranger, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts--together. In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that Black women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, "How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?"
Out now with Cornerstone / follow Yrsa Daley-Ward
The Benefactors - Wendy Erskine
Meet Frankie, Miriam and Bronagh: three very different women from Belfast, but all mothers to 18-year-old boys. Gorgeous Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children's services charity, loves celebrity and prestige. When their sons are accused of sexually assaulting a friend, Misty Johnston, they'll come together to protect their children, leveraging all the powers they possess. But on her side, Misty has the formidable matriarch, Nan D, and her father, taxi-driver Boogie: an alliance not so easily dismissed. Brutal, tender and rigorously intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, polyphonic presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny.
Out now with Hodder and Stoughton
Borderline Fiction - Derek Owusu
At nineteen, Marcus is young and in love . . . again. When his latest crush, Adwoa, starts showing him true affection, Marcus is ready to reconsider his lifestyle - the drugs, the casual encounters. At least for a little while. Now, before he knows it, Marcus is twenty-five. And history risks repeating itself. Told through two parallel narratives - one past, one present - Borderline Fiction is a highly original and deeply affecting contemporary tale written with an intensity of emotion and vulnerability. The novel is a close-up, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes funny examination of what it means to be a young black man navigating today's world. Tortured, beautiful, anxious and poetic, Borderline Fiction is a memorable glimpse into the inner world of a young man searching for an authentic way to love and be loved.
preorder available now, publishes November 6 with Canongate
Hekate - Nikita Gill
A propulsive, electrifying and enraging retelling in verse of the life of Greek goddess Hekate, child of war turned all-powerful goddess of witchcraft and necromancy, by internationally bestselling poet Nikita Gill. Born into a world on fire, Godling Hekate has never known safety. After her parents find themselves on the losing side of the war between the ruling Titans and the new Olympian Gods, Hekate is taken by her mother Asteria to the Underworld, where Styx and Hades agree to raise her. Meanwhile, Asteria is pursued across the world by Zeus and Poseidon and, to escape their clutches, transforms herself into an island in a stormy sea. Orphaned and alone, Hekate grows up amongst the horrors and beauties of the Underworld, desperate to find her divine purpose and a sense of belonging in the land of the dead. When she finally uncovers her powers and ascends to Goddess status, she realises that even the most powerful Olympians are terrified of her. But when immortal war breaks out again, threatening to destroy everything from Mount Olympus to the Underworld itself, the Goddess of witchcraft and necromancy is the only one who can bring the deadly conflict to an end...
Preorder now, publishes 16 September with Simon & Schuster / follow Nikita Gill
Resistance - Steve McQueen
A landmark work charting how acts of resistance have shaped Britain and the powerful role of photography as a catalyst for change, across the twentieth century, curated by acclaimed artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen.
Resistance presents a century of activism, from the radical suffrage movement in 1903 through key moments including the Battle of Cable Street, the Black People’s Day of Action, Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and the Miners’ Strike; onto protests against environmental destruction, struggles for LGBTQ+ and disability rights; culminating with the largest protest in Britain’s history: the march against the War in Iraq in 2003. Featuring contributions from groundbreaking voices such as Gary Younge, Paul Gilroy and Baroness Chakrabarti, alongside powerful images from renowned photographers including Vanley Burke, Edith Tudor-Hart, Tish Murtha and Paul Trevor. Resistance uncovers the often-overlooked stories of individuals who have been instrumental in forming modern Britain and is a testament to the empowering impact of collective action today.
Crossing: A love story between Italy and Palestine - Sabrin Hasbun
A beautiful and compelling family memoir retracing the love story between Sabrin Hasbun's Palestinian father and Italian mother, and the life of her half-Italian, half-Palestinian family from the 1960s to 2020. After the loss of her mother, Sabrin tries to renegotiate her mixed identity and understand her mother's choices which led her from an oppressive childhood in a village in Tuscany to finding love and community activism in Palestine. This is a story about overcoming grief and what it means to lose not only loved ones, but also a place in the world and a sense of belonging.
Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books - Ursula K. Le Guin
Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality . . .
Words Are My Matter is a selection of Ursula K. Le Guin's best writing on literature, articulating with precision and passion her belief in the social and political value of storytelling - especially in hard times. In doing so, and with her characteristic spirit, Le Guin offers both a glimmer of hope and a set of operating instructions for a life lived with meaning.
Preorder available now, publishes November 6 with Canongate Books
Oh Big Blue
The poems in this collection were written and illustrated by children aged 9 to 17 from Palestine. They are some of the Palestinian entries from the 2024 Hands Up Project poetry competition. They are presented in the form in which they were originally received, with a foreword by Alice and Peter Oswald.
The title of the collection was taken from one of the competition entries, a poem by 13-year-old Joud Isleem, who wrote: “Oh great sea, oh big blue! Take my dreams and bring me hope.” These are poems written by children, written in a second language, written from the centre of impossibility, written under bombardment, written with no water, written with no internet, written in a notebook and decorated with butterflies and sometimes decorated with blood. They show the beauty of the world, even in impossible circumstances.
Published by the Hands Up Project — “we are committed to social justice, global citizenship, and freedom of expression, and upholds the belief that language learning is enhanced through creativity, performance and collaborative interaction. To these ends, the project affords opportunities for children in difficult circumstances, such as Palestine, to use English to communicate with one another across borders in a spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity.”
Out now with the Hands Up Project
Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror
Unleash the dark and delirious with this electrifying anthology of folk horror from some of Britain's most iconic working-class voices: A.K. Blakemore, Daniel Draper, Emma Glass, Mark Colbourne, Mark Stafford, Hollie Starling, Jenn Ashworth, Natasha Carthew, Salena Godden and Tom Benn.
A phonograph cylinder that plays on a loop for eternity, casting out ghostly spectres of violence; a centuries-old stew made of severed body parts; a bigoted woman working at an ossuary, the bones she watches over her only remaining friends; three siblings who set out to scatter their father's ashes, a man none of them could stand; and a hag stone sitting in the pocket of a witch. Uncanny and unsettling, wild and wyrd, the ten stories in this collection showcase the best of folk horror. Set in and across England, they celebrate working-class culture and history, and, sharp as a guillotine blade, reveal the real monsters that stalk our green and pleasant land.
Preorder available now, publishes October 16 with Vintage Publishing
Sounds good, will have a listen. 👍🏻