Set across two timelines, 1936 and 2012, Manny and the Baby is a debut novel about a grieving son, Itai, desperate to connect to his late father through the pile of cassette tapes wrapped in newspaper that he left behind. What is recorded on those tapes leads Itai to discover the fervid history of two estranged sisters, Manny and Rita, and a Jamaican trumpeter who is Itai’s grandfather, Ezekiel Brown, who all find each other amid Soho’s smoky prewar jazz scene.
The story starts in 2012 against the backdrop of the Olympics. Itai, a proud London boy, travels to Bath to make sense of his father’s death and why he bought a house in a city he had no obvious connection to. “The place was weird. Surreal. Looked like a film set, a cardboard country, begging for him to huff and puff and blow it all down.” Itai perseveres and moves into the property – filling the place with plants and looking through his father’s archive (he was a scholar in ethnomusicology). He buys weed from local boy Josh, a runner and part-time dealer, whose side hustle is at odds with his athletic ambitions.
