It must take a certain amount of focus and a prodigious amount of talent to secure an agent on the strength of three chapters then land yourself a two-book deal at 19. The subsequent two years of manuscript revisions were done alongside a history degree at King’s College, and now, in her final year she’s simultaneously working on her sophomore novel.
“We felt that it was time to have a black book/literary event. We have been to the literature festivals here in London and Hay-on-Wye, we have been to the slams, the salons, the featured authors events – all good fun, of course and we’d certainly not want to be without them. It is just that apart from the splendid African Writers Evenings, London is a bit light on gatherings that celebrate black readers and writers.” Black Book Swap organisers.
I know there’s a perennial discussion about whether black authors benefit from bookshop black sections, I know many people feel that it ghettoises black writing but I firmly believe if a bookshop stocks black authors in both the black section and the general fiction then it’s 100% win. I’m far more concerned when bookshops don’t have a black interest section because it’s far easier to disguise a dearth of black books.
So one in three British children do not own a book. Obviously none of those children are related to me. Because if they were they’d get a new book every Christmas. Yes, I am that auntie. And not only do I buy my young relative a book, I call on New Year’s day and fully expect them to have read said book.
They are the first generation, Indian and American and caught in the incongruous gulf between the two. They are also the daughters of the Hindi-Bindi Club, a nickname they bestowed on their Indian-born mothers, women who followed their husbands to the West in the 60s and found a piece of home in the bonds of their friendship.
“My Best Friend’s Girl was my third book. It had been doing really well before because it had a fantastic cover and posters at tube stations. I came back from Australia and did lots of posing with the posters. Then Richard and Judy happened and it went through the roof. I went to number 19 then number 2. I couldn’t make it up. Well, I’m a writer so I could…”
He was expelled from secondary school. And all the schools that followed. By 14 social services did not know what to do with him. They sent him to Brixton where he was placed in a hostel. The idea was he’d be tutored three days a week. His social worker didn’t have many words for him, except a warning not to go down to the ‘Frontline.’
What I really wanted to do was go back to something I call a blueprint. That’s another thing the blues was. It was the blueprint. It was the first recorded music by people who had escaped or left the motherland – Africa. It’s the first Diasporic music form. I’m very much a hip hop man but obviously the basis of hip hop is the blues and that was given to Jamaica and then people started imitating it in the form of Ska, the early reggae then they sent it back to America and the Americans used it to make rap. So I was interested in that blueprint of the blues. To go back to the essence in a sense with this book which is really people. Our stories.
The drama launches like a bullet from a gun and rockets along for all 435 pages. Jade and her fellow musketeers spend most of those pages battling for their lives and I admit I had to put the book down a number of times while I mustered the strength to endure their latest disaster.
There is a real sense of menace from the villains. Frankie is a heartless godfather figure, ruthlessly ambitious, manipulative, his penchant for violence tempered only by clear-eyed cunning. Mitchell cleverly counterpoints him with a raft of mindless thugs, the foot soldiers who wreck havoc in the lives of our heroines.
