When his dad dies under police arrest after a pub brawl, Cory goes to live with his cousin, Sean. By their late teens the cousins, though close, have chosen different paths. Sean is trying to improve his life through education, whereas Cory has already become involved in petty crime - burglary and dealing E. However, everything changes when Cory stabs a man called Roger after a rave, putting him in hospital. This has grave repercussions for Cory - Roger was supposed to be taking part in an armed robbery with Levi, a notorious crack dealer. Levi now expects Cory to take his place. But Cory breaks his leg during a football match and Sean, unable to find a replacement for his cousin, and desperate to help him, agrees to join in on the robbery himself. However, having entered a world of (apparently) easy money and hard drugs, Sean finds it increasingly hard to return to his previous life as The Scholar......

The Scholar

Literature & Fiction

Newland, Courttia

Contemporary

ABACUS +

Writing Short Stories: A Writers' and Artists' Companion is an essential guide to writing short fiction successfully.
 PART 1 explores the nature and history of the form, personal reflections by the editors, and help getting started with ideas, planning and research.
 PART 2 includes tips by leading short story writers, including: Alison Moore, Jane Rogers, Edith Pearlman, David Vann, Anthony Doerr, Vanessa Gebbie, Alexander MacLeod, Adam Thorpe and Elspeth Sandys.
 PART 3 contains practical advice - from shaping plots and exploring your characters to beating writers' block, rewriting and publishing your stories.

Writing Short Stories: A Writers' and Artists' Companion (Writers' and Artists' Companions)

Reference

Hershman, Tania

Words, Language & Grammar

Bloomsbury Academic

Nominated for the 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Fiction! Publishers Weekly has named The Gospel According to Cane a 2012-13 "Notable African-American Title" "A mother's love is unbreakable, as Frank O'Connor Awardnominee Newland demonstrates in his latest novel...The storytelling is as captivating as the story itself. Newland, a Jamaican-born British writer, seamlessly integrates the joy, fear, uncertainty, and sadness...Newland's prose is beautiful. His novel--part homecoming narrative in the vein of Toni Morrison's Beloved and part haunting tale of loss similar to Ernest Gaines's In My Father's House--will appeal to all lovers of literary fiction." --Library Journal "The emotional tension is sometimes almost unbearable as a mother and son attempt to build a relationship out of their shared pain. A unique and very moving novel." --Booklist "The characters are finely drawn with realistic ambiguity and genuinely exhibit the durability of grief and pain." --Publishers Weekly "Newland delivers an intense portrait of mental conflict against a gritty inner-city background. The book we are reading is Beverley Cottrell's journal...This 'journal of my pain,' becomes a spiral of cathartic violence during which Newland deftly keeps the reader guessing." --Kirkus Reviews "As Bev confesses in her journals to events that make her appear less than the fragile idealist she first appeared, Newland's tale gathers pace and tension. Violence becomes a real possibility. Happy ending or sad? Newland delivers a bit of both in this complex, cathartic portrait of an intelligent, if not always sensible woman, who refuses any longer to be defined by loss." --Toronto Star "What could be a simple, emotive story of grief and redemption becomes, in Newland's hands, something more complex...The Gospel According to Cane is a page-turner, merging serious literary fiction with social commentary. Those interested in a fresh, vibrant take on contemporary London life should add it to their shelves." --Switchback "Throughout The Gospel According to Cane, Mr. Newland takes on...the meaning of family and the risks associated with helping those in distress...With realism and without sanctimony, Mr. Newland successfully engages some of the most difficult questions we will ever face." --New York Journal of Books Beverley Cottrell had a dream life: a prestigious job, a beautiful husband and baby boy. This is stolen from her one winter afternoon when her son Malakay is kidnapped from a parked car. Despite a media campaign, a full police investigation, and the offer of a reward, Malakay is never found. Beverley’s marriage soon dissolves and her husband immigrates from England to the U.S. with a new wife. Beverley gives up her job, sells the house, and moves from the leafy suburbs to the inner city to reside in a west London housing project. She cocoons herself in grief, growing more isolated with each passing year. After two decades she gives up any hope of finding her son. She teaches children who have been expelled from school in the local community center, bright kids thrown on society’s scrap heap. Beverley starts to believe she has finally pieced her life togetheruntil a young man starts appearing wherever she goes. Beverley is convinced that he’s stalking her. One dark evening the stalker gets past her security door and calls through her letterbox. He tells her not to be scared. He says that he is Malakay, her son. The Gospel According to Cane is a novel about inner-city youth in contemporary London. It’s a meditation on pain and loss, the burden of heritage, and how the past can blur the present. It’s about trust and the perceived lack of trust, disillusion, and its consequences. A world where everyone is the victim, and no one is to blame.

The Gospel According to Cane

United States

Akashic Books Ltd

A monumental speculative fiction story of love, loyalty, politics, and conscience, set in parallel Londons. "Newland...imagines a world where colonialism never happened at all...It's speculative fiction that genuinely made me speculate." --Wired "A dystopian multiverse imagined at thrilling scale...Extraordinary...The excitement lies largely in its ideas about power and personal responsibility." --Times Literary Supplement "Newland has produced a text that piques and provokes, providing a guidebook to worlds both uncomfortably familiar and radically new." --Strange Horizons "An immersive speculative novel set in a dystopian city that's facing an uprising." --Foreword Reviews, a Book of the Day selection "What would London be like if the UK had not colonized half the world? That's the question that drives Courttia Newland'sA River Called Time. When young Markriss has the opportunity to move into the Ark--a massive structure that promises a utopian existence for the invited--he takes it, only to find that the world of his dreams isn't as idyllic as he was promised." --Bustle "Part sci-fi, fantasy, and Afro-futurism but not squarely one or the other,A River Called Time transports the reader into a London undone by time, a London of possibility and, necessarily, of new villains." --Public Books "No one can doubt the sheer energy and verve of Newland's vision." --The Guardian (UK), Book of the Day selection "This mystical coming-of-age tale...is sure to please fans of thought-provoking speculative fiction." --Publishers Weekly "This is an ambitiously imagined book that, by removing the European lens on African cultures, creates a new reality that allows us to question how we view our own. Complex and multilayered, this novel opens the door to the possibilities of noncolonial worlds." --Kirkus Reviews "A River Called Time is ambitious, sprawling, unpredictable and fascinating...A relentlessly imaginative novel about a world where colonialism and slavery never occurred and yet brutal inequality persists." --Shelf Awareness "Courttia Newland is a formidable writer...And his latest work,A River Called Time, is an extraordinary piece of speculative fiction...Newland offers a brilliant remix of history...This may be a work of speculative fiction but its critical lens is present and prescient." --Financial Times, reviewed by Imani Perry The Ark was built to save the lives of the many, but rapidly became a refuge for the elite, the entrance closed without warning. Years after the Ark was cut off from the world--a world much like our own, but in which slavery has never existed--a chance of survival within the Ark's confines is granted to a select few who can prove their worth. Among their number is Markriss Denny, whose path to future excellence is marred only by a closely guarded secret: without warning, his spirit leaves his body, allowing him to see and experience a world far beyond his physical limitations. Once inside the Ark, Denny learns of another with the same power, whose existence could spell catastrophe for humanity. He is forced into a desperate race to understand his abilities, and in doing so uncovers the truth about the Ark, himself, and the people he thought he once knew.

A River Called Time

Literary

Product Description 
A dark and incisive collection of speculative short stories set in an alternate future of interstellar space travel, robots, mythical creatures, and the uncanny. 
"Newland easily engages readers with complex world-building, well-shaded characters, and stories as entertaining as they are meaningful. It's no small feat to so immediately and repeatedly appeal to readers' hearts and minds, and Newland's mastery of short-format storytelling is sure to impress. Speculative fiction fans won't be able to put this down."—Publishers Weekly, starred review 
"Newland's writing is in league with a host of SF subgenres, from pulpy space opera to N.K. Jemisin–style Afrofuturism to Jeff VanderMeer–esque eco-fiction. But his chief skill is weaving those tropes into stories that are both wildly speculative and on the news . . . Wide-ranging and deeply imaginative; Newland is equally at home in council flats and deep space."—Kirkus Reviews 
In his exquisite first collection of speculative fiction, Courttia Newland envisages an alternate future as lived by the African diaspora. 
Kill parties roam the streets of a post-apocalyptic world; a matriarchal race of mer creatures depends on interbreeding with mortals to survive; mysterious seeds appear in cities across the world, growing into the likeness of people in their vicinity. 
Through transfigured bodies and impossible encounters, Newland brings a sharp, fresh eye to age-old themes of the human capacity for greed, ambition, and self-destruction, but ultimately of our strength and resilience. 
 Review 
More Praise for Cosmogramma: 
"The collection’s 16 stories interweave an unsettling familiarity with the strange, tackling themes such as the technological arms race, addiction, racism, state-sanctioned violence, and xenophobia, holding up a mirror to contemporary society and forbidding the reader to look away and take comfort in escapism...These visions of largely grim alternate realities and bleak futures will be appreciated by those who prize speculative fiction’s ability to tell uncomfortable truths about our present."—Booklist 
“Newland’s second venture into science fictional territories is a rich, diverse collection of short stories.”—The Guardian 
“Short stories have long been the bedrock of science fiction, and this batch is full of fresh, intriguing premises around which entire novels could have been based.”—The Herald 
“A collection that pushes the edges of sci-fi and Africanfuturism. The stories in Cosmogramma deal with class, race, and power imbalance, and more than one of them ends in regime change and/or mass casualties at the hands of renegade robots and/or mutant children. Sound grim? It can be, but Newland’s cinematic storytelling and sense for justice often leave you feeling like things turned out the way they should.”—Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the Best New Books of November 2021 
"Newland's work is tender but urgent, grounded but visionary. Risks don't frighten him. These highly imaginative, often cautionary tales seem the product of a world governed by outrage, anxiety, and unease. You won't forget them in a hurry. Nor should you."—Rupert Thomson, author of Barcelona Dreaming 
"The stories in Cosmogramma are shot through with a sense of foreboding, a feeling that we as a species are heading for self annihilation if we don't get our act together and fast. In that sense, and in several others, the stories feel unsettlingly contemporary and can—and should—be read as a last call to action. 'The Sanofka Principle' in particular bent my mind out of shape, in a good way. Now there's a story that requires (and repays) close reading!"—Stephen Thompson, author of Meet Me Under the Westway 
Critical Praise for A River Called Time: 
"A River Called Time is a masterful reimagining of the African diaspora's influence on England, and on the world. It's a grand tale and still an intimate portrait of loss and love. What glory and influence would Africa enjoy if colonial

Cosmogramma

CANONGATE BOOKS *

LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE\nA monumental speculative fiction story of love, loyalty, politics and conscience set in parallel Londons\nThe Ark was built to save the lives of the many, but rapidly became a refuge for the elite, the entrance closed without warning. Years later, Markriss Denny is one of the select few granted entry. He carries with him a closely guarded secret: the ability of his spirit to leave his body and transcend the known world.\nBut once in, he learns of another who carries the same power, and their existence could spell catastrophe for humanity. Denny is forced into a desperate race to understand his abilities, and in doing so uncovers the truth about the Ark, himself and the people he thought he once knew.

A River Called Time: Courttia Newland

Drawing inspiration from everything from traditional horror movies to the sophistication of contemporary Japanese short-story styles, the literary and the popular merge seamlessly in this uniquely black British mix. This collection meticulously and insightfully observes West London's black communities—from patterns of speech, fashions, and pleasures to the pressures of racism and exclusion they seek to escape. Delighting in the dark, the grotesque, and the uncanny, these entertaining, genre-smashing stories provocatively reject the implicitly territorial limits placed on black British writing, and are followed by an afterword in which the author writes of his frustration with the narrow limits imposed on black British fiction by mainstream publishing expectations.

Music for the Off-Key: Twelve Macabre Short Stories

Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

Beverley Cottrell had a dream life: a prestigious job, a beautiful husband and new baby boy. But then, one winter afternoon, when her son was barely a few weeks old, Malakay was kidnapped from a parked car. Despite a media campaign, a full police investigation and the offer of a reward, he was never found.  Two decades later, Beverley starts to believe that she has finally pieced her life together  -  until a young man starts to appear wherever she goes. One dark evening the stalker gets past her security door and calls through her letterbox. He tells her not to be scared. He tells her that he is Malakay, her son.

Telegram

Whatever happened to British protest? For a nation that brought the world Chartism, the Suffragettes, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and so many other grassroots social movements, Britain rarely celebrates its long, great tradition of people power. In this timely and evocative collection, twenty authors have assembled to re-imagine key moments of British protest, from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 to the anti-Iraq War demo of 2003. Written in close consultation with historians, sociologists and eyewitnesses – who also contribute afterwords – these stories follow fictional characters caught up in real-life struggles, offering a streetlevel perspective on the noble art of resistance. In the age of fake news and post-truth politics this book fights fiction with (well researched, historically accurate) fiction.

Protest: Stories of Resistance

Green, Michelle

Clanchy, Kate

Maitland, Sara

CONSTANTINE, David

Bedford, Martyn

Ross, Jacob

Evers, Stuart

Jacques, Juliet

GEE, Maggie

Hird, Laura

Alland, Sandra

Cottrell-Boyce, Frank

De Waal, Kit

Hedgecock, Andy

Holness, Matthew

Pester, Holly

QUINN, Joanna

Rhydderch, Francesca

Sayle, Alexei

Genre Fiction

Comma Press

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Books by Newland, Courttia