Open Water

Dec 23

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Reviewed by Linda
📙📙📙📙

Thank you to @penguinukbooks for this early copy! Open Water is out now and I highly recommend it. 🧡

With this light book in my hands, it was impossible to predict that I was about to be immersed head first into a whole host of emotions. Nelson explores what it’s like to feel love’s keen sting for a young black couple in South East London.

We don’t know either of our protagonists by name which makes it all the more intimate. Told from the second person it’s as though we’re peeking into something that we shouldn’t be privy to.

Smooth, lyrical but exposing and raw, Nelson’s writing is incredible. The story hits hard and Nelson doesn’t really try and sugarcoat the vulnerability, hardship and detachment when things become burdensome. When our male protagonist is overcome and can’t call his soulmate back, the reader is on tenterhooks. And when the couple can’t find the words, masterfully, Nelson does for them.

With a racially polarised backdrop and Nelson’s male character not sure if each day is his last, Nelson writes about survival and doing what needs to be done to preserve the soul even if it means severing the connection with someone you love.

More books from South London please!!! 🧡

LindaFictionwriters of colourdebut authorsblack authorsopen watercaleb azumah nelsonpenguin bookssouth london

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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