Better Will Come came to me as I was listening to a Delroy Wilson song called “Better Must
Come.” The song is about faith, resilience, perseverance in the thick of struggle, and hope in
oneself and the future: I’ve been tryin’ a long, long time, still I can’t make it/Everything I try to
do seems to go wrong/It seems I have done something wrong/Why they’re trying to keep me
down?/Who God bless no one curse/Thank God I’m not the worst/Better must come one day.
It’s my best-selling book by far.
Shine Eye Girl is my most personal project yet. It’s a bittersweet story that starts, innocently enough, with a romantic encounter. A dark current runs through it. I played with it stylistically, switching the angles of narration. It is short, fast-paced, to the point, blunt, and, like the milieu and the people it depicts, very urban.
Monkey Bread is the first book in a series featuring Detective Chris James, an ex-D.C. cop
with ties to Senegal—my take on the noir genre. Though the series is set in Dakar, I take liberties
with the locale and events, so readers shouldn’t expect a street-by-street rendition of the city and
its people, or a play-by-play of real occurrences. Writers can get away with such indulgences,
apparently.
The second book in the Chris James series, “Under Heavy Manners,” is planned for early 2011.
