In 2020, poet and podcaster Derek Owusu won the Desmond Elliott prize for his debut novel, That Reminds Me, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative about K, a young Ghanaian man who’s grown up in Britain, which Owusu began writing in the wake of a mental breakdown. He now follows it with Losing the Plot, a playfully pointed title for a book that is very much a companion to its predecessor, not least in terms of its category-confounding form.
The paragraphs that make up its short, impressionistic chapters often float on the page like verses of an extended poem and elsewhere sit hemmed in by extensive sidenotes. There are sentences in (Ghanaian dialect) Twi, too – sometimes contextualised but rarely translated, their rhythms and cadences perhaps more telling and certainly more flavoursome than any half-captured meaning. While That Reminds Me focused on K’s experiences, here it’s the days of an immigrant mother that Owusu strives to record – or rather, her son Kwesi’s efforts to imagine a life whose lacunae she stubbornly refuses to fill for him. Those sidenotes accommodate his first-person commentary, spicing an otherwise enigmatic text with humour and hurt, respect and exasperation.
