Janiene Julia

Rainbow Milk is Paul Mendez's semi-autobiographical debut that follows Jesse McCarthy, a gay Black man born in the West Midland as he explores his sexuality against the backdrop of the Windrush Generation, religious doctrine, and homophobia as he is kicked out of his home after being outed. Jesse struggles with this displacement, eventually running away to London, immersing himself in the gay nightlife there and becoming a sex worker. Like Jesse, Paul Mendez is a gay Black man of Jamaican her...

I once saw this book described as a ‘literary horror’ in a Goodreads review online, and immediately thought that no other phrase aptly described the kind of story this is.
Our Wives Under The Sea is author Julia Armfield’s debut novel, coming after her critically acclaimed collection of short stories Salt Slow. It follows wives Leah and Miri in the wake of Leah’s return from an unexpectedly long underwater research trip. She was meant to be gone for three weeks, but weeks turned into months, ...

Eliza Clark’s debut novel Boy Parts follows Irina: a twenty-something Newcastle native and a fetish photographer of young boys. She’s endlessly tall and skinny, with red hair and a young Priscilla Presley look to her. Recently put on paid leave from her part-time bartending job, after a young boy’s mother slaps her for putting racy photos of him on her website (she thought he was in sixth form but his older brother’s passport said otherwise, didn’t it) Irina soon falls into a black pit filled...

Luster, which is author Raven Leilani’s debut novel, follows Edie – a twenty-three year old Black artist struggling to survive on her painfully low salary at a publishing house in New York. She avoids the many men she’s had sex with at the office, including her ex-boyfriend Mark, and comes home every evening to a cockroach-infested apartment. The novel is a deep dive into Edie as a young woman, her past and desires, as well as her increasingly complicated relationship with Eric Walker, an old...

I Who Have Never Known Men is the first book by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012) to be translated into English (2018). Originally published in French in 1995 under the title Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes, this is an incredibly profound dystopian science-fiction novel that I was utterly impressed by. Having been so engrossed by Harpman’s work here, this review is an attempt to capture its greatness, which is partly philosophical in nature, without revealing too much. At one po...

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo seems to have taken the internet by storm recently, a few years since its 2017 release. Its cover, a bronze woman in an elegant emerald-green dress and a short crop of bright blonde hair, is practically engrained in my brain. For several months before I actually found the time to read it, I saw that shiny green dress everywhere: on publishing Twitter, where publishing hopefuls and editors alike tend to congregate, and where the avid readers and reviewers are:...

Migrations is Australian author Charlotte McConaghy’s debut novel, and it is an incredibly emotive and beautifully-written tale of journeys, both necessary and dangerous, both human and animalistic. I came across Migrations on the increasingly influential platform that is BookTok, a particular side of TikTok dedicated to the world of books.

Love Orange, hailed as a ‘vivid comic cocktail about a modern American family,’ is translator Natasha Randall’s debut novel. The book chronicles the lives of the Tinkley family: a traditional, all-American, white, Christian suburban family living in a stereotypical cul-de-sac in the town of Bentonville. Parents Jenny and Hank relocate from the city with their two young sons: twelve-year-old Jesse and eight-year-old Luke in 2014 into an Arts and Crafts home. A year later…

Under The Blue is Oana Aristide’s debut novel, published in 2021. It chronicles the experience of a reclusive artist in the midst of a plague-like pandemic that leaves Europe a deserted, soon-to-be-inhabitable wasteland littered with corpses in the year 2020. At the same time, researchers Lisa and Paul are ‘educating their baby’ Talos, an advanced AI program, out in the Arctic Circle. As time goes on, and Harry traverses a deeply unfamiliar and unsettling European landscape, these two threads...

Cleopatra and Frankenstein is Coco Mellor’s appropriately-labelled ‘triumphant debut’. Chronicling the impulsive and ill-dated marriage between Cleo and Frank, and all is negative side-effects, Mellors debut novel is a wickedly beautiful read.

D.A. Mishani’s Three, translated to English by Jessica Cohen, is a visceral crime thriller. Set in Israel, though spanning other countries such as Romania and Poland, three women, unrelated but soon connected in a way they’ll never know, will all meet the same man: Gil Hamtzani, an immigration lawyer. Orna, a divorced single mother, Emilia, a religious caretaker from Latvia, and Ella, a student and mother feeling trapped in her marriage, will all come across Gil, for better or worse.
Mishani ...

Covering various genres, these stories paint an incredibly vast and varied picture of Barcelona as a city of fantasy, a city to experience. I would recommend both the city and this book to those keen to explore her.

Not all characters are human, and this codified approach to representation subverts something else: the deeply entrenched norms that are whiteness, heterosexuality, and neurotypicality.

When They Find Her is a bit of tearjerker. With some some really shocking twists and turns, namely toward the end, this is a book about one woman and how her love for her daughter and her complex web of lies and secrets are fundamentally incompatible.

Living While Black is an exploration and confrontation of “the nuances of Blackness,” and how to heal and overcome when anti-Blackness breeds racial trauma by formulating a “tailored self-care plan.” This book is borne out of author Guilaine Kinouani’s lived experiences and evidence as a Black woman.