There’s a clear winner from the book vote this month, but before we get to it I wanted to share an LGBTQIAP+ travel memoir named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Elle, Them, Book Riot, LitHub, Stylecaster, and Chicago Review of Books in addition to being named One of Esquire‘s Best Memoirs of 2024!
A memoir given the highest of praise:
“Phenomenal…. A memoir that opens into the world, with brilliance, courage, and elegant prose…. This is a book to read, read again, and remember.” —Imani Perry
“Bursting with humor and life, it will do more than transport readers; for many, it will be transformative.” —Esquire
In their new book, Shayla Lawson reveals how traveling can itself be a political act, when it can be a dangerous world to be Black, femme, nonbinary, and disabled. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self.
Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year’s Eve in Mexico City, Lawson’s travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal.
Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location—and their deepest emotions—to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms.
BUT WHAT BOOK ARE WE READING for the club?
Acclaimed by Cosmopolitan Magazine, the LA Times, Out Magazine, and many others, “this is a unique and devastatingly hopeful story about the paradox of love: even in the midst of war, and in a world dominated by violence and prejudice, still, love transcends.” (Mia Couto)
Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and its war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly.
Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls. When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie.
As Edwidge Danticat has made personal the legacy of Haiti's political coming of age, Under the Udala Trees uses one woman's lifetime to examine the ways in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood. Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are also wrecked and lost from taboo and prejudice. This story offers a glimmer of hope—a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love.
A special thank you to book club member, Linda Varick Cooper for the suggestion.
Happy reading! (If you want to read & discuss the winning book together, join our online book club on Facebook.)