Motherland: And Other Stories

Wandeka Gayle’s mostly young black women protagonists win our hearts as risk-taking, adventurous explorers of the white world, away from home, which at some point has been Jamaica. They include Roxanne, who starts work in a care home in London and strikes up a rapport with a depressed old man who used to be a writer; Ayo, who heads to college in Louisiana and fights off the internalised voice of her godly, tambourine-beating aunt to begin an affair with an engaging, slightly older white man...