At the start of Tremor, Tunde, a Nigerian-American photography professor at a New England university, is on his way to work when he pauses to photograph a hedge. “You can’t do that here,” a voice calls out. “This is private property.” Cole’s third novel goes on to follow Tunde’s movements over several months during which he reflects on how people of colour are treated in supposedly white spaces and the ways colonialism reverberates down the generations.
During a seminar, Tunde struggles to keep his emotions in check when a student shows a short film about Samuel Little, a prolific serial killer who went undetected for decades owing to his victims being Black female sex workers. While shopping for antiques in Maine with his partner, he reflects on the violence wreaked on Native American communities in the area, setting him on a train of thought that takes him from Bach’s solo works to the John Wayne movie The Searchers to the Salem witch trials. But the book’s centrepiece is a series of first-person snapshots that show the struggles of assorted Lagos residents, among them a drug addict, a chauffeur, a DJ and a headteacher.
Alternately narrated by voice actor Atta Otigba and American Gods’ Yetide Badaki, both of whom lean into Cole’s calmly hypnotic prose, Tremor is an inventive patchwork of portraits, memories and reflections that span art, literature, history and popular culture. Through this ambitious cauldron of ideas, Cole asks us to pay attention to entrenched attitudes and hierarchies and to understand the lens through which we each see the world.
• Tremor is available from Faber, 7hr 49min
Further listening
The Women
Kristin Hannah, Macmillan, 14hr 55min
After her older brother leaves to serve in Vietnam, Frankie, a 21-year-old nursing student, impulsively joins the Nursing Corp so that she can follow in his footsteps. Read by Julia Whelan.
The House of Hidden Meanings
RuPaul, HarperCollins, 7hr 6min
The Drag Race icon narrates his memoir detailing his path from poverty in San Diego to the early 1980s punk and drag scenes in Atlanta, to global fame and success via RuPaul’s Drag Race.
