Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams review a smart and breezy debut
The ObserverFictionReviewA Londoner’s low self-esteem leads to a series of ill-advised flings in an amusing first novelYou can’t help but suspect that literary fiction short-changes readers when it comes to portraying black Britons. A novel such as Diana Evans’s Ordinary People, about middle-class midlife marital crises, felt radical mainly because the alternatives tend to be gritty or nothing: a choice between, say, Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City, about estate kids caught up in riots, or John Lanchester’s south London panorama Capital, without a black British character in sight.
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