Author Peter Akinti, of Nigerian ancestry, was raised in east London's Forest Gate housing project, and it shows on every page. The brutality and poverty and casual racism that charge his debut novel, Forest Gate, feel disturbingly authentic.
His tight, grim tale opens with two black teenage boys who are best friends preparing to commit suicide. With ropes around their necks, communicating by walkie-talkie from the roofs of two facing 31-story high rises of council flats, at exactly midnight they both jump. Only one of the boys dies. The other accidentally survives and continues to live in a world where he's forced by other people's expectations into being someone he's not.
Most of the first half of the book is narrated by Meina, whose 16-year-old brother, Ash, is the boy who succeeds in killing himself. She and her brother are Somalian refugees brought to London by their murdered father's white friend. The second half of the book is primarily told by James Morrison, Ash's only friend, the other would-be suicide, whose mother is a crack addict and whose five brothers are the project's most notorious drug dealers. James doesn't want to be like them, wants something more out of life, but doesn't believe white society will let him have it.
Meina and James are both in desperate need of healing; the reader feels their pain, and watching them heal each other becomes the primary pleasure of the unfolding plot, which takes them to Cornwall and ultimately to Brazil, and comes loaded with an unexpected tragic turn that feels true and provides the road to redemption.
It's a novel about people in collision--race against race, gang against gang, brother against brother. From the opening moment, in which Meina identifies the body of her dead brother, the reader feels how racially and economically trapped these characters are. Meina wonders "if there was ever such a thing as escape. Since life is ultimately what you carry around in your heart." Fortunately for both her and James, not to mention the reader, their grief leads them through the fire toward a hopeful new life on the other side.--Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: Nigerian-English author Peter Akinti has written a grim, but ultimately hopeful, tale of life in the brutal council flats of England and the desperate measures people will take to flee it.