Black Sunday
Tola Rotimi Abraham
Canongate, £8.99
Twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike have their comfortable middle-class life in Lagos snatched away when politics force their mother out of her government job and their father is scammed in a dodgy money-making scheme. Looked after by their Yoruba grandmother, they do menial jobs to keep their younger brothers, Andrew and Peter, fed and to pay the fees for the boys’ harsh boarding school. But the sisters’ paths begin to diverge, Ariyike going full Pentecostal and pursuing a career in Christian radio, while Bibike clings to more secular values. Beginning in 1996, Black Sunday follows the siblings over the next two decades, with alternating chapters from different perspectives. In a confident, moving debut novel, Abraham unflinchingly presents women trying to make their way through a soul-destroying culture of corruption and sexual exploitation, finding strength in the scattered moments when her characters rise above their predicaments with grace and determination.
Do Dice Play God?
Ian Stewart
Profile, £9.99
Author of a staggering 120 books and garlanded with a host of honorary doctorates, Ian Stewart reverses the famous Einstein quote to examine how human beings have sought to find patterns in the randomness around them. When it comes to calculating probabilities, he writes, our intuition is “hopeless”, and he leads us through the various means we have employed to try to predict future events, from divining entrails through devising laws of motion to eventually embracing unpredictability as an inherent feature of a quantum universe. Going against the grain of popular science books, Stewart doesn’t go out of his way to make it easy for the layman. There are equations aplenty, and mathematical concepts that require close attention and hard thought. But it’s worth persevering, as they’re spliced into a diverting and informative narrative which encompasses gambling, thermodynamics, entropy and the particular difficulties of predicting phenomena like weather and the economy.
The Last High
Daniel Kalla
Simon & Schuster, £8.99
Both a crime thriller and a medical mystery, Kalla’s latest novel is sited squarely in the midst of the opioid epidemic sweeping North America. Seven overdosed teenagers are brought into a Vancouver hospital from a party, their hearts unable to beat by themselves. Only two survive the night. Clearly, there’s a devastatingly potent drug on the streets, and bodies quickly pile up. ER doctor and toxicologist Julie Rees joins forces with her police detective love interest Anson Chen to try to track down the source in a city where great wealth exists alongside hopeless poverty, and organised crime has its hooks in both. A doctor in real life, Kalla whips up an all too plausible scenario with well-realised characters, such as the dealer who lectures his customers always to take drugs responsibly and Julie herself, a former opioid addict driven by her need to redeem herself for the death of her fiancé.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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