Caleb Azumah Nelson

The winner of the 2021 First Novel Award, Caleb Azumah Nelson joins us to celebrate the paperback release of his brilliant Open Water. 

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists – he a photographer, she a dancer – trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.

At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it.

With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.

We’re delighted to welcome him to the bookshop for an evening of conversation and storytelling.

‘Hands-down the best debut I’ve read in years’ ~ The Times

‘A beautiful and powerful novel about the true and sometimes painful depths of love’ ~ Candice Carty-Williams, author of QUEENIE

‘A love song to Black art and thought’ ~ Yaa Gyasi, author of HOMEGOING and TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM