Biblio File: Under the Cover with Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

These are the books you’ll want on your shelves this spring, says Belinda Bamber. Keep an eye out for a debut novel from Lizzie Damilola Blackburn, a love story from Kasim Ali and new works from Hannah Bourne-Taylor and Eloghosa Osunde.

Biblio File: The C&TH Book Club

Lizzie Damilola Blackburn’s feel-good debut, Yinka, Where is Your Huzband? opens with an engaging family party, at which Yinka’s jolly Nigerian aunties wag their fingers at her single status and embarrass her by inviting all the guests to join them in prayer for her to find a ‘huzband’. Yinka vows there’s nothing wrong with being 31, single (and a virgin), but devises a game plan to get a boyfriend in time for her cousin’s upcoming wedding. Her ensuing dating journey entails droll set-pieces, cultural clashes, hapless blunders, a job crisis, her lurking ex, and sibling friction. But it’s her dawning self-knowledge that provides the satisfying story arc.

The tribulations of love and race are explored from the man’s point of view in Kasim Ali’s Good Intentions. Nur wants to marry his soulmate, Yasmina, but after four years’ living together still hasn’t introduced her to his traditional, British Pakistani parents, believing they won’t accept she’s Black. As he explores delicate themes of race and family, Ali shows rare honesty in unpicking Nur’s fear and self-doubt. Unafraid to show their protagonists in an unflattering light, the authors suggest self-delusion can be as great a barrier to happy coupling as the oppositions they perceive around them. It’s the old adage: to meet ‘the one’, you first need to accept and love yourself

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