"The writing is beautiful and the characterisation tender, funny and satisfyingly voyeuristic."—Hannah Eaton, author of Naming Monsters Mameluke Bath is the bizarre story of Christie Smithkin, a 39-year-old misfit, misanthrope and virgin, who lives in the nightmarish English city of St Pauly. Friendless, paranoid, and lacking the funds she needs for the completion of her PhD thesis, mixed-race Christie’s only hope lies in a new ‘asylum-seeker mentoring’ scheme for which she has recently volunteered as a mentor. Offering guidance to recently-arrived African refugees fleeing torture will, she prays, provide her with a sense of social purpose and perhaps even emotional connection. Christie’s plan goes awry when she discovers that Mukelenge, her Congolese mentee, has already been assigned a mentor: Damon, a cheerful, vapid, white male nurse. Worse still, Mukelenge is settling into urban East Midlands society with unnerving confidence and poise. Piqued by the immigrant’s miraculous feats of integration, Christie becomes uncontrollably jealous when she realises that Mukelenge is also casting a spell of seduction over the handsome, doll-like Damon. Christie’s determination to solve the mystery of Mukelenge’s identity, to rescue Damon from the real or imagined horrors of a zombie-factory deep in the woods, and to come to terms with her own terrifying childhood, will hurtle all three protagonists towards a macabre conclusion in the nearby spa town of Mameluke Bath.

Mameluke Bath

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Asibong, Andrew

Fantasy

Open Books

This is the first full-length study of the films of François Ozon, director of such diverse films as 8 femmes, Swimming Pool, 5x2 and Les amants criminels. Andrew Asibong's passionate and critical analysis focuses on the extent to which Ozon's seemingly light touch never ceases to engage with the fundamentally weighty issue of existential transformation, a transformation that affects of both his protagonists and his audiences. A central question emerges: what is at stake, cinematically, ethically and politically, in Ozon's alternatively utopian and cynical flirtation with the construction and deconstruction of contemporary social relations. Revealing Ozon as a highly adept 'fan' of a whole range of thought, literature and cinema, Asibong places the precocious French auteur in an intellectual yet highly accessible critical framework, allowing Ozon's importance for a thoroughly postmodern filmgoing generation to be given the attention it deserves.

François Ozon (French Film Directors Series)

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Manchester University Press

Post-traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image (The Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture Series)

This book explores how traumatic experiences of impingement and neglect – in childhood and adulthood, and at both the family and the state level – may create a desire in us to be parented by certain kinds of screen media that we unconsciously believe are “watching over” us when nothing else seems to be. 
Andrew Asibong explores how viewers make psychical use of eerily moving images, observed in film and television and later taken into an already traumatised mind, in order to facilitate some form of reparation for a stolen experience of caregiving. It explores the possibility of a media-based “working through” of both the general traumas of early environmental failure and the particular traumas of viewers racialised as Black, eventually asking how politicised film groups in the age of Black Lives Matter might heal from a troubled past and prepare for an uncertain future through the spontaneous discussion – in the here and now – of enlivening images of potentially deadly vulnerability. 
Post-traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image: Something to Watch Over Me will be of great interest to academics and students of film, media and television studies, trauma studies and psychoanalysis, culture, race and ethnicity.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

Routledge

Available in paperback for the first time, this is a full-length study of the films of François Ozon, director of such diverse films as 8 femmes, Swimming Pool, 5x2 and Les amants criminels. Andrew Asibong’s passionate and critical analysis focuses on the extent to which Ozon’s seemingly light touch never ceases to engage with the fundamentally weighty issue of existential transformation, a transformation that affects both his protagonists and his audiences.A central question emerges: what is at stake, cinematically, ethically and politically, in Ozon’s alternatively utopian and cynical flirtation with the construction and deconstruction of contemporary social relations.Revealing Ozon as a highly adept ‘fan’ of a whole range of thought, literature and cinema, Asibong places the precocious French auteur in an intellectual yet highly accessible critical framework, allowing Ozon’s importance for a thoroughly postmodern filmgoing generation to be given the attention it deserves.

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

This is the first critical study in English to focus exclusively on the work of Marie NDiaye, born in central France in 1967, winner of the Prix Femina (2001), the Prix Goncourt (2009), shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2013), and widely considered to be one of the most important French authors of her generation. Andrew Asibong argues that at the heart of NDiayes world lurks an indefinable blankness which makes it impossible for the reader to decode narrative at the level of psychology or event. NDiayes texts explore social stigmata and familial disintegration with a violence unmatched by any of her contemporaries, but in doing so they remain as strangely affectless and unrecognizable as their dissociated protagonists. Considering each of NDiayes works in chronological order (including her novels, theatre, short fiction and writing for children), Asibong assesses the aesthetic, emotional and political stakes of NDiayes portraits of impenetrable selfhood. His book provides an original and provocative framework within which to read NDiaye as a simultaneously hybrid and hyper-French cultural figure, fascinating and fantastical practitioner of the postmodern - and reluctantly postcolonial - 'blank arts'.

Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 30)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Liverpool University Press

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Books by Asibong, Andrew