Marisel Vera emerges as a major new voice in contemporary fiction with this capacious (The New Yorker) novel set in Puerto Rico on the eve of the Spanish-American War. Up in the mountainous region of Utuado, Vicente Vega and Valentina Sanchez labor to keep their coffee farm from the creditors. When the great San Ciriaco hurricane of 1899 brings devastating upheaval, the young couple is lured along with thousands of other puertorriquenos to the sugar plantations of Hawaii, where they are confronted by the hollowness of Americas promises of prosperity. Depicting the roots of Puerto Rican alienation and exodus, which resonates especially today, The Taste of Sugar is a gorgeous feat of storytelling (Tayari Jones).

I don't want to tell you what happened; I want to tell you how it felt.

Cassandra Williams is twelve; her little brother Wayne is seven. One day, when they are alone together, there is an accident, and Wayne is lost forever. Though his body is never recovered, their mother is unable to stop searching. The missing boy cleaves the family with doubt: How do you grieve an absence? And how does it feel?

As C grows older, she relives and retells her story, and she sees her brother everywhere: in coffee shops, subway cars, cities on both sides of America. Here is her brother's older face, the colour of his eyes, his lanky limbs, the way he seems to recognise her too. But it can't be, of course. Or can it? And then one day, there is another accident, and C meets a man both mysterious and familiar, a man who is also searching for someone, as well as his own place in the world. His name is Wayne.

Namwali Serpell's piercing new novel captures the ongoing and uncanny experience of grief, as the past breaks over the present, like waves in the sea. The Furrows is a bold and beautiful exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a masterful story of mistaken identity, slippery reality, black experience, and the wishful and sometimes willful longing for reunion with those we've lost.

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