A middle-aged man with a guilty taste for schoolgirls looks for a way to
end his shame; a hotel receptionist begins a sexual adventure with
shattering consequences; a young man is troubled by a persistent itch
behind his shoulder-blades; a young African boy confronts his bullying
class-mates in a surprising way; a sculptor is asked to make a realistic
life-size woman by a Japanese client. In these and the other stories in
this collection, there is a delight in the dark, the grotesque and the
uncanny.
In each of the stories most of the characters are Black, and it both
does and doesn't matter that this is so. As Courttia Newland's previous
books have led us to expect, he is a meticulous, insightful observer of
West London's Black communities, of their patterns of speech, fashions,
their pleasures and the pressures of racism and exclusion they seek to
escape. These are communities (and stories) in which crime, violence and
drugs are part of the realities of life.
But what is important here is not the sociology, but the form, in
particular Courttia Newland's reinvigoration of the classic, popular
short story form with its play with narrative twists and the unexpected.
Drawing inspiration from everything from traditional horror movies to
the contemporary sophistication of Japanese works in this genre, Newland
brings together the literary and the popular in a uniquely Black British
mix.
In an afterword to these stories, Newland writes of his frustration with
the narrow limits imposed by mainstream publishing expectations on Black
British fiction, trapped between the immigrant 'Windrush' novel and the
Yardie gangster novel with its American borrowings. Music for the
Off-Key is distinctively British in its materials, black in a number of
senses, and a thoroughly entertaining and sometimes shocking break-out
from limiting expectations.
Courttia Newland was born in 1973 in Hammersmith, West London.
