“I met Irenosen at an author’s event and we swapped signed copies of our books and I was absolutely knocked out by her skill in telling what is, in many ways, a straightforward tale of a young Nigerian girl in London but interwoven with many other strands, including a wonderful magical element. Haunting and compelling, Butterfly Fish is a richly told story of love and hope, of family secrets, power, political upheaval, loss and coming undone.” Joy unearths the ties between her mother, grandfather, the wife of the king, and the brass head’s pivotal connection to them all.Ī spiritual successor to the tales of Marquez, Butterfly Fish masterfully combines elements of traditional Nigerian storytelling and magical realism in a multigenerational take of the legacy of inheritance. Joy’s search for the origins of the head take us on a journey through time as dark family secrets come to light. Joy’s fortune begins to change when she receives an unexpected inheritance from her mother: a huge sum of money, her grandfather’s diary and a unique brass warrior’s head from the nineteenth century kingdom of Benin. “After the sudden death of her mother, London photographer Joy struggles to pull the threads of her life back together, with the support of her kind but mysterious neighbour Mrs Harris. Jon’s suggestion is Butterfly Fish by Irenosen Okojie, published by Jacaranda Books. Jon is the author of Ordinary Joe, published by Borough Press. The first suggestion this week comes from Jon Teckman. And please do let me know if you have any books you’d like to suggest. Hopefully you’ll discover a treat or two. So in each post I’ll aim to highlight a couple of titles that may have been missed from your reading awareness. (That was the working title for this series of posts and as inspiration hasn’t struck me with anything better, its the one I’m going with for now). So that sparked a germ of an idea and I decided to do a series of posts highlight titles that myself and other bloggers and authors feel may have gone under the reader’s radar. It was agreed that it was such a shame that certain books weren’t as widely read, as the reading public were missing out on hidden gems. During one of the threads there was mention of ‘quiet’ books, the ones that miss out on the big publicity push. I’m part of a wonderful online community called Book Connectors where bloggers, reviewers and authors can discuss all things book related. Even the larger publishing houses have a limited marketing and publicity budget so can’t promote all the novels they publish to an equal degree. It may be that they are written by self-published authors who don’t have the marketing knowledge or a small independent publisher who doesn’t have the marketing budget to spread the word. That doesn’t mean that the rest aren’t worthy of reading. Only a small percentage of those make it to the best-seller list. There are thousands upon thousands of books published each year.
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