Stories From the Tenants Downstairs

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What to expect

Set in a Harlem high rise, a tight-knit cast of neighbours grapple with their own personal challenges while the forces of gentrification threaten to upend life as they know it.

Banneker Homes is a low-income high rise in Harlem where gentrification weighs on everyone's mind. There is Swan in apartment 6B, whose excitement about his friend's release from prison jeopardises the life he's been trying to lead. Mimi, in apartment 14D, who hustles to raise the child she had with Swan, waitressing at Roscoe's and doing hair on the side. And Quanneisha B. Miles, a former gymnast with a good education who wishes she could leave Banneker for good, but can't seem to escape the building's gravitational pull. These neighbours weave in and out of each other's lives, endeavouring to escape from their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love.

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs brilliantly captures the joy and pain of the human experience and heralds the arrival of a uniquely talented writer.

(P) 2022 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

Bold, funny and gloriously flawed voices of New York . . . a bravura debut
Observer
Absolutely brilliant . . . tender and tough
Daily Mail
Outstanding . . . [Fofana] masterfully paints a portrait of the people most impacted by gentrification
New York Times Book Review
Ambitiously voiced and inventively structured . . . The sentences are infused with energy and dark humour, heralding an impressive debut voice and a skilful, pleasing collection
Sunday Business Post
Fofana makes us feel viscerally the weight of life's injustice. He doesn't idealize or airbrush his characters, yet he enables us to know their wit, ingenuity, joy, and resilience
Harpers
His characters exude life and the different voices stay with the reader long after the book has been shelved
Boston Globe
Heralds an indelible, inimitable new literary voice . . . full of humanity and humor and hope, full of insight into the plight of people too often pushed to the margins of America-the-dream . . . not only a great joy to read, it's evocative, essential art
Mitchell S. Jackson, author of Survival Math and The Residue Years
Full of tenderness and truth . . . The voices of the residents of Banneker Terrace linger and echo long after the last page. A tremendous debut!
Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Every once in a while a new writer comes along and refreshes our notions of what fiction can do. Sidik Fofana is one of those rare and wonderful writers . . . nothing short of revelatory. Buy this book, and prepare to be blasted by the brilliance inside
Ben Fountain, author of Beautiful Country Burn Again
The book I've been waiting for . . . The author knows this community and its predicaments and has assembled a cast that will break your heart but also at times put your heart back together again. Mr. Fofana has an acute ear and a perfect eye, and he doesn't rush. This is important American art
Lorrie Moore, author of Bark
A huge canvas of life where every detail has been lovingly rendered. Immersive, artful and moving. A wondrous debut
Oisín Fagan, author of Nobber
Stories which are often as funny as they are poignant . . . It's an impressive collection, so confident and assured it's hard to credit that it's Fofana's first
A Life in Books
It impressed not only for its ingenuity, but its tenderness and compassion
Irish Times, Books of the Year

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