Sufferah

Not only an intimate and completely engaging memoir, but also an essential piece of social history. Often heartbreaking but frequently life-affirming too. Alex is a truly gifted storyteller, and the way he details his own story here is no exception.

This searing record of a writer's journey offers much more: A history of the reggae revolution in bass riddim. A raw account of racism in Britain. A prose that is Wheatle at his best-gritty, fast-paced, salty, funny, restrained, a tightrope walker's balance. For me, a Black writer in America, the part that resonates the most is, it's the story of how we overcome. Once you start reading, it's hard to put this book down. - author of A Tall History of Sugar

Alex Wheatle's Sufferah is a moving account of one writer's indomitable will to overcome the odds stacked against him. A tender, hilarious, and deeply felt memoir, the book places Wheatle's experiences in foster care and incarceration within a larger context of racism in the UK and dovetails with his coming of age as a lover of reggae music and Jamaican culture. What a gift to witness Wheatle's journey to find and forgive his birth family and to make a life and family of his own - author of THE STAR SIDE OF BIRD HILL

Alex Wheatle's bracingly honest, at times excruciatingly evocative memoir is shaped by the poetics of reggae music-but more than that, it is reggae music: brimming with all the pain and injustice that is baked into Babylon system, yet at the same time, by virtue of its artistic majesty, a beautiful transcendence of these things - author of INCARCERATION NATIONS

Inspiring . . . His journey from orphan to self-professed storyteller is by turns gripping and heartbreaking - Publishers Weekly