LITERATURE
October Book Club Literary masterpieces to celebrate Black History Month 2025’s core themes of power and pride
KILEY REID Come and Get It
Newly single, 37-year-old writer Agatha Paul is starting her life over in Fayetteville, Arkansas after taking a visiting professorship for a year while doing research for her new book on wedding culture. Meanwhile, Millie Cousins, a student working at the same college as a resident assistant, needs all the funds she can get, so she helps Agatha set up research interviews for her book with other young people in the dorm. The societal truths casually dropped by the candid, off-guard students are much more fascinating than any research project, and just like that: the book is off and running. Reid effortlessly segues between characters, slowly but surely revealing the links that bind this disparate group of individuals together – more than they might like to admit. As with her first book, Such a Fun Age , this latest novel is completely engrossing from the start, packed with superbly written, whip-smart character studies. The richly textured cast of characters soon begin to connect in unexpected ways and, as the novel builds, you begin to notice the ripples of characters’ choices crashing up against each other. A brilliantly insightful, unputdownable and deeply clever novel that’s a treat for anyone needing to escape into another world.
A group of young black British friends navigate London life in this richly imagined collection of tales. SHORT STORIES For Such a Time as This SHANI AKILAH
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store JAMES MCBRIDE
there requires a jump back in time to the 20s and 30s in the run-down Chicken Hill neighbourhood, where a black community and Jewish immigrants are living side by side, building real connections against all odds. On paper, this is a small-town murder mystery, but quickly becomes the tale of the US at large: displaced peoples battling against prejudice, poverty and the cruel hand of fate, slowly realising that there’s more uniting them than dividing them, and that if they pull together, there’s nothing they can’t overcome – and no secret they can’t keep.
Opening this book is like settling down on a sofa with a master storyteller. You might not know where the tale’s headed, but if you can hold tight through the detours and digressions, give yourself up to the ebb and flow of the narratives and trust McBride’s exceptional, award-winning writing, this is the most rewarding and heartbreaking of novels that deserves its position on many best-of lists. In 1972 Pennsylvania, US, a construction project grinds to a halt when a skeleton, a belt buckle, some old red threads and a mezuzah are found in the bottom of an old well. How they got
26 OCTOBER 2025 CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK
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