8 Books Published by Catapult on AALBC — Book Cover Collage
Broughtupsy
by Christina CookeCatapult (Jan 28, 2025)
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At once cinematic yet intimate, Broughtupsy is an enthralling debut novel about a young Jamaican woman grappling with grief as she discovers her family, her home, is always just out of reach.
Tired of not having a place to land, twenty-year-old Akúa flies from Canada to her native Jamaica to reconnect with her estranged sister Tamika. Their younger brother Bryson has recently passed from sickle cell anemia—the same disease that took their mother ten years prior—and Akúa carries his remains in a small wooden box with the hope of reassembling her family.
Over the span of two fateful weeks, Akúa and Tamika visit significant places from their childhood, but time spent with her sister only clarifies how different they are, and how years of living abroad have distanced Akúa from her home culture. “Am I Jamaican?” she asks herself again and again. Beneath these haunting doubts lie anger and resentment at being abandoned by her own blood. “Why didn’t you stay with me?” she wants to ask Tamika.
Wandering through Kingston with her brother’s ashes in tow, Akúa meets Jayda, a brash stripper who shows her a different side of the city. As the two grow closer, Akúa confronts the difficult reality of being gay in a deeply religious family, and what being a gay woman in Jamaica actually means.
By turns diasporic family saga, bildungsroman, and terse sexual awakening, Broughtupsy is a profoundly moving debut novel that asks: what do we truly owe our family, and what are we willing to do to savor the feeling of home?
Sankofa
by Chibundu OnuzoCatapult (Feb 07, 2023)
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Anna is at a stage of her life when she’s beginning to wonder who she really is. In her 40s, she has separated from her husband, her daughter is all grown up, and her mother—the only parent who raised her—is dead.
Searching through her mother’s belongings one day, Anna finds clues about the African father she never knew. His student diaries chronicle his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London. Anna discovers that he eventually became the president—some would say dictator—of a small nation in West Africa. And he is still alive…
When Anna decides to track her father down, a journey begins that is disarmingly moving, funny, and fascinating. Like the metaphorical bird that gives the novel its name, Sankofa expresses the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present to address universal questions of race and belonging, the overseas experience for the African diaspora, and the search for a family’s hidden roots. Examining freedom, prejudice, and personal and public inheritance, Sankofa is a story for anyone who has ever gone looking for a clear identity or home, and found something more complex in its place.
The Islands: Stories
by Dionne IrvingCatapult (Nov 01, 2022)
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Powerful stories that explore the legacy of colonialism, and issues of race, immigration, sexual discrimination, and class in the lives of Jamaican women across London, Panama, France, Jamaica, Florida, and more.
The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women—immigrants or the descendants of immigrants—who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call the Island. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to unearth the cracks in their marriage. In another, the only Jamaican mother—who is also a touring comedienne—at a prep school feels pressure to volunteer in the school’s International Day. Meanwhile, in the third story, a travel writer finally connects with the mother who once abandoned her.
Set in locations and times ranging from 1950s London to 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey, Dionne Irving reveals the intricacies of immigration and assimilation in this debut, establishing a new and unforgettable voice in Caribbean-American literature. Restless, displaced, and disconnected, these characters try to ground themselves—to grow where they find themselves planted—in a world in which the tension between what’s said and unsaid can bend the soul.
This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown
by Taylor HarrisCatapult (Jan 11, 2022)
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Finalist for the 2023 Southern Book Prize
A Black mother finds herself confronting the boundaries of her beliefs—about science, medicine, motherhood, and faith—as she seeks the truth about her son. Taylor Harris wakes up one morning to find her lively twenty-two-month-old son, Tophs, listless and weak, prompting her to rush him to the doctor. Despite her own anxiety disorder, she follows her maternal instincts and seeks medical help. The doctors confirm that something is wrong with Tophs, setting Taylor on a journey that will forever change her life.
As the doctors provide answers to some of her questions about her son’s troubling symptoms, more questions arise, and Taylor embarks on a relentless pursuit of a diagnosis. Navigating a healthcare system that often fails Black mothers and children becomes a challenging task, requiring her to invest countless hours and endure both frustration and discrimination. Amidst her tireless efforts, Taylor also faces her own health revelations during an appointment with a geneticist.
This Boy We Made is a poignant and beautifully written exploration of the profound bond between a mother and her child. Through the hardships and unexpected twists that unfold, Taylor gains valuable insights into the meaning of life and the strength required to navigate through unforeseen circumstances.
White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color
by Ruby HamadCatapult (Oct 06, 2020)
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Called "powerful and provocative by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist, this explosive book of history and cultural criticism reveals how white feminism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women, and women of color.
Black Sunday
by Tola Rotimi AbrahamCatapult (Feb 04, 2020)
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"I like the idea of a god who knows what it’s like to be a twin. To have no memory of ever being alone."
Twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike are enjoying a relatively comfortable life in Lagos in 1996. Then their mother loses her job due to political strife, and the family, facing poverty, becomes drawn into the New Church, an institution led by a charismatic pastor who is not shy about worshipping earthly wealth.
Soon Bibike and Ariyike’s father wagers the family home on a "sure bet" that evaporates like smoke. As their parents’ marriage collapses in the aftermath of this gamble, the twin sisters and their two younger siblings, Andrew and Peter, are thrust into the reluctant care of their traditional Yoruba grandmother. Inseparable while they had their parents to care for them, the twins’ paths diverge once the household shatters. Each girl is left to locate, guard, and hone her own fragile source of power.
Written with astonishing intimacy and wry attention to the fickleness of fate, Tola Rotimi Abraham’s Black Sunday takes us into the chaotic heart of family life, tracing a line from the euphoria of kinship to the devastation of estrangement. In the process, it joyfully tells a tale of grace and connection in the midst of daily oppression and the constant incursions of an unremitting patriarchy. This is a novel about two young women slowly finding, over twenty years, in a place rife with hypocrisy but also endless life and love, their own distinct methods of resistance and paths to independence.
In the Country of Women: A Memoir
by Susan StraightCatapult (Aug 06, 2019)
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"To understand my daughters and their sisterhood, you have to know the women, and sisters, who came before." In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and the nation’s indomitable women, written by National Book Award finalist and Guggenheim Fellow Susan Straight
Welcome to Lagos: A Novel
by Chibundu OnuzoCatapult (May 01, 2018)
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A provocative portrait of a rapidly-changing Nigeria by a “tremendous” young novelist who is “energizing the form.” (William Boyd, The Guardian)
When army officer Chike Ameobi is ordered to kill innocent civilians, he knows it is time to desert his post. As he travels toward Lagos with Yemi, his junior officer, and into the heart of a political scandal involving Nigeria’s education minister, Chike becomes the leader of a new platoon, a band of runaways who share his desire for a different kind of life. Among them is Fineboy, a fighter with a rebel group, desperate to pursue his dream of becoming a radio DJ; Isoken, a 16-year-old girl whose father is thought to have been killed by rebels; and the beautiful Oma, escaping a wealthy, abusive husband.
Full of humor and heart, Welcome to Lagos is a high-spirited novel about aspirations and escape, innocence and corruption. It offers a provocative portrait of contemporary Nigeria that marks the arrival in the United States of an extraordinary young writer.