Peter Culshaw’s Clandestino: In Search of Manu Chao (Serpent’s Tail) is an excellent addition to the inexplicably slim writings that exist on the Basque-French musician and agitator. Endowed with the sang-froid needed to join the Chao circus, Culshaw’s book is part-travelogue, part-history, and a thumpingly good book. The fictional short stories in JK Sivalingam’s Dare to Dream: Heroic Tales for the Tamil Diaspora (self-published) offer a surprisingly upbeat hint of what life is, or could be, like for Tamils worldwide following the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka in 2009. Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s The Bottom of the Jar (Archipelago) revisits his childhood during the final days of French colonial occupation – a warm and engaging bildungsroman.
Titles don’t get much better than The Skeletal Essences of Afro-Funk, the third volume of the Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou’s rampage through Benin’s sonic undergrowth. The latest in the amazing Africa Analogue series, it’s extraordinary.
