The emotional rollercoaster of having to constantly mend the various parts of your life back together becomes increasingly familiar in your 20s. In Liv Little’s debut novel Rosewater, we bear witness to 28-year-old Elsie Macintosh stitching (and restitching) her life back together time and time again, all while grappling with the idea of home. The novel begins with Elsie getting evicted from her house, and proceeds to slowly reveal the other ways in which she yearns for a safe landing place. Through this yearning and the way it shows up in Elsie’s relationships, Liv Little is able to illustrate the way intimacy, tenderness and love is the necessary grout that moulds our existence together.

One Saturday afternoon when I was about 10-years-old, I found a DVD when I rummaged through a cousin’s drawer looking for spare change to go buy a treat from the corner store. The cover of said DVD was a collage of voluptuous naked women, some contorted into poses, and others mounted on top of each other. Underneath that DVD, I found a few others with similar covers, this time with men too. I was instantly intrigued. And sure, shocked too, but mostly intrigued. I did not yet quite understand what I had stumbled upon, but I knew that this was clearly something I was not supposed to see- I was rummaging in a drawer that didn’t belong to me so I wasn’t supposed to see anything in there at all, but the strict parental guidance on our DSTV also let me know that I certainly was not supposed to see that much nudity. And if I wasn’t supposed to see it, I had no idea how to begin to ask anyone about it.

Tilda, the second film from Shorties, a gal-dem series of short films by POC filmmakers is a nearly 7min film that sees what starts off as an online cam show transform into a meet-cute. When asked who he’d want to fuck alongside the cam-girl, the client responds “old white chick [who]…played a mother to a little evil ass kid.” The cam-girl, whilst gracefully swaying to the music, deciphers this vague description to be of Tilda Swinton from We Need to Talk About Kevin.

At the bedrock of any party scene lies DJs. You’ve got club managers, event promoters, party goers but really, it’s a great DJ that threads all of these units together for a great event. Over the years, a turning tide has seen more and more women DJs in the world on event lineups, and the Kenyan party scene has been a part of this domino effect has. DJ Miss Ray, DJ Shishi and DJ Niks, made their debuts about a decade ago, about 5 years ago, and last year respectively. That’s a combined almost two decades worth of time and effort spent carving out their own lanes in the industry.

Talia Hibbert is growing bolder in her love for romance. “I take so much pride in telling these stories,” she earnestly shares towards the end of the interview, before adding, “and because of the support of readers who have told me what these books mean to them, I have become much more open about the things that I really care about.” The young romance author is steadily building her own romcom universe of sexy and diverse novels, featuring often misunderstood, passionate and unwittingly funny characters of colour. We caught up with her to discuss her writing journey, character building and the spicy sex scenes that have become a staple of her work.

In Tomi Oyemakinde’s The Changing Man fear is to be conquered as much as it is to be embraced. The novel follows a precocious and lonely teenager, Ife Adebola, as she navigates settling into new boarding school Nithercott, and the adventures that follow her investigation of the school’s elusive urban legend. This debut offering joins the ever growing canon of YA speculative thrillers that combine a horror-esque pace, and the levity familiar to the young adult fantasy genre- although it is arguably at its best when the focus is on the latter. In The Changing Man, this explorative prose in anchored by a protagonist whose Nigerian roots form not only the casing for her character, but also for the novel’s motivations.