Things I Have Withheld

WINNER OF THE OCM BOCAS PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITINGIn this astonishing collection of essays the award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies inherit - the crimes that haunt them and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world variously assuming privilege or victimhood. Through letters to James Baldwin encounters with Liam Neeson Soca Carnival family secrets love affairs white women''s tears questions of aesthetics and more Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice. With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why - our actions defence mechanisms imaginations and interactions - and those of the world around us.