Thought-provoking and heart-wrenching

A prize-winning novel by one of Japan's most notable women authors

A subtle dissection of the attitudes of Japanese women

The author is a woman of great intelligence, profound psychological insight, and extraordinary sensitivity

Absorbing, sensitive, and utterly heartrending

That Reminds Me by Derek Owusu reads like an open wound. The prose runs like a pulse, builds like the beat of some lowercase drum. Honest and beautiful.

That Reminds Me is heartbreaking, important and original. Derek Owusu's words are precious scars.

Owusu’s work is a much-needed contribution to literature. His work is profoundly tender, often wry and always sharply observed. He grants us a rare, nuanced glimpse into the world of a vulnerable young black man, negotiating his identity in a complex and difficult world.

Honest, insightful, and woven together in a narrative that will undoubtedly change lives.

That Reminds Me is extraordinary. It’s a complex, emotional story – intimately told. Every word is used to great effect, and the images Derek evokes are simply stunning. It is unique, original and so very beautiful. I enjoyed this book very much.

This book was gripping and an emotional rollercoaster. One that we could not put down.

Derek Owusu's voice is originally poetical and profoundly authentic. That Reminds Me is an addictive and painful delight, full of familiar bruises I don't know how I got but couldn't stop pressing.

It's a tough read that rewards a thousand times. I love the fragmentary form and the sense of beauty that builds throughout. So raw, tender and transporting.

A fresh and powerful debut... within contemporary British literature it is still uncommon to find these ideas about the brittleness of identity considered from the perspective of young black male characters. It is equally rare to find these concerns handled so unflinchingly... When the writing operates in this highly focused mode, as Owusu engages with the concrete minutiae of lived reality, That Reminds Me is especially powerful. K’s mother works as a cleaner at a local school, and his musings on her attitude to her job – “she is so attentive to the floor, like wiping food from her child’s face” – are expressed with real tenderness. A simple moment when the grown-up K gives a young black boy in the street coins so he can buy sweets like his white friends is revelatory. Told in unadorned sentences, this fleeting encounter speaks volumes about K’s perceptiveness, sensitivity and desire for connectedness. The same is true of a beautifully crystalline anecdote in which he helps an elderly Ghanaian stranger with her luggage on the tube. When the fragments mine the inner lives of those surrounding K, the writing often sings with particular feeling and clarity... in the sensitivity of its approach and its impressionistic quality, it is a singular achievement... There is a palpable charge and welcome freshness to the voice here that is undeniable.

A moving, semi-autobiographical story about a vulnerable black man - a one-off. The story's most touching moments are about compassion and are never oversold... The sense is of suffering making room for empathetic insight. This book is brave and moving... Owusu writes with an enlightening fluency.

If you want to see what the policies from Whitehall that keep the working classes struggling look like in human guise, when placed in an environment where their identities have to be negotiated daily, That Reminds Me is the viewfinder you need. It’s post-Thatcher reality in the inner city, clouded over by racism, infused with West African stoicism, narrated by a voice that has known something different. It’s life as a growing boy experiences it, with a powerless wonder; it’s messy and beautiful, fractured but eloquent. K’s story reminds us that our scars should not strip us of our dignity.

In weaving emotion into literary gold, truth has never been this painfully told, or this beautiful.

The best poetry out since Warsan Shire.

A fast-paces, dense, poetic, original and bewitching story by an important new writer. That Reminds Me will long be remembered by readers.

Deserves the same recognition that greeted Max Porter's similarly constructed fictionalised memoir Grief is the Thing With Feathers... uses its broken-up style to explore experiences that defy easy comprehension. There is nothing indulgent about this quietly observed account of a black man Owusu gives the name of K... There is a physicality to his writing, the impression of incoherent feelings being wrestled into shape, that lends his book heft. K's future is, in the end, ambiguous, but Owusu's surely gleams bright.

A bold prose poem written in novella form, That Reminds Me is one of the most powerful pieces of writing to be published in 2019.

The latest release from Stormzy's increasingly impressive #Merky imprint, this is a stylistically ambitious memoir of a precarious Tottenham upbringing. Owusu writes with a poet's gift for seemingly incidental observation in a potent story that's left deliberately, troublingly fragmented.

A virtuosic debut by a raw new talent. An honest and timely evaluation of a black man's struggle to belong and later come to terms with failing mental health. Utterly convincing and deeply sad, Owusu's storytelling will bring readers to tears.

Derek Owusu is not just a brilliant writer, he’s a deep thinker. Anything he does is relevant, and meaningful. It would be easy to say that he is mainly concerned with the condition of young black men, but in truth he speaks truth to all of us.

A magnificent achievement.

Written with candour and verve, and full of moments of heart-stopping anguish and beauty.