In addition to reading books by Black authors during Black History Month, this is a great time to dig deep and discover why they write what they write. We asked Lauren Francis-Sharma, author of Casualties of Truth, David Wright Faladé, author of The New Internationals, and Tochi Onyebuchi, author of Racebook, the questions everyone has been dying to know.

 

What inspired you to write your most recent book?

LFS: I wrote Casualties of Truth out of a desire to give voice to people and stories that have been quieted for far too long. In 1996, I attended the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Amnesty Hearings in South Africa and realized that not enough people outside of South Africa knew the specific horrors of Apartheid. I wish I could have done more, but a novel seemed the best vehicle to share  stories of this particular slice of time in modern history.

DWF: The idea for the novel began in family history—specifically, in my mom’s backstory, about which I had notions growing up but which had remained a bit vague. My mom, who passed in 2016, wasn’t the sort of person to purposely avoid speaking about her past. When she would, though, she had a tough time being specific or precise. It was always mostly just her impressions.

She was born about a decade before the Nazi occupation of France, in a very wealthy and very secular Jewish family. The family didn’t practice at all. My mom understood herself to be a French child of privilege more than she understood herself to be Jewish. It was the war and the Nazi occupation of France that drove this home in her, and at an age—during her early teens—when questions of identity are typically difficult and confusing for most young people.

After the war, she was outraged by what she and her family had been forced to go through, but also haunted by feelings of guilt—about what she had done or not done; about the seemingly random forces that had permitted her to survive where so many others, including some very close to her, had not. She embraced anticolonialism and other freedom movements, and that brought her into contact with a broad and colorful (pun intended) cast of characters, including two men with whom she would eventually fall in love: a fellow university student who was the grandson of the last King of Dahomey—a West African kingdom which, for two and a half centuries, had played a major role in the transatlantic slave trade; and a Black GI, who was, necessarily, the descendant of enslaved people.

So, the novel is, on some level, an effort to try to understand my mom and the experiences that shaped her into the person I knew. On another level, a love triangle between those three very different people—a Holocaust survivor, the descendant of African slave traders, and the descendant of slaves—seemed like a great story to tell.

TO: After my novel Goliath came out, I took some personal inventory and, to my dismay, discovered that the writer I’d become—seven books into my career at that point—would have been unrecognizable from the writer I imagined myself to be back in high school and college when I was most in love with writing, with storytelling. I wasn’t writing about the things that fascinated me when I was younger and intent on making a career out of this, and I found instead that I’d constructed an oeuvre that was far from what I’d imagined for myself back then. So I set out to interrogate that gulf, why this thing had happened to me, how. Very quickly, the Internet loomed over me as an answer. Or, at least, a large part of one.

 

Describe the kind of reader that you write for. Who do you want to reach and what do you want them to get out of your work? What do you hope your work inspires?

LFS: I write for readers who are not only curious about the past but who want to feel fully transported by words. My readers care deeply about the world and are asking themselves tough questions about where we’ve been and where we are now. Often when I meet readers they want to talk to me and others in the room about geopolitics, larger social constructs, “big ideas” that come from my novels. What I hope is that my books are always vehicles to building community.

DWF: My last two books have been categorized as historical fiction, and I’m glad for them to wear that label. With that said, I hope that readers approach my books as reflections of our present times, too, and not just as dramatizations of past events from our history. I want to attract readers who are looking toward our past as a way to understand who we are as a people today.

TO: I’m kind of audience-last as a writer. What I mean by that is that I’m writing first and foremost for myself but also in the blind faith that there is someone out there who may find themselves seen expressed in the writing. At least with Racebook, I wanted to be very expansive and intentional with what I referenced, how I wrote about what I wrote about, sort of living in this idea that Attack on Titan references could live alongside a dissection of a nineteenth century French novel. There’s gotta be someone out there for whom that all makes sense. I guess I’m writing for people who might find themselves asking the same questions I’m asking. And while I can’t really proffer any answers, maybe we can make the walk through those questions a little less lonely.

 

If your most recent main character were real, what is a piece of advice you would give them?

LFS: Prudence Wright is steely but she is also an extremely sensitive human. She is grappling with the moral questions around revenge and retribution, and though she is being blackmailed and threatened by someone she once trusted, ultimately she makes her own decision about what is right and wrong. Despite the heaviness of her dilemma, there are moments with her autistic son where Prudence seems to be actively reaching for joy. I would encourage her to be more intentional about finding these moments.

DWF: Trust yourself and stop looking for fulfillment from men!

Cecile would be a much less interesting fictional character were she to follow this advice, but her life would likely be a lot less tumultuous and painful.

 

What kind of research did you do for your book? Was there anything new or surprising you learned?

LFS: During the Amnesty Hearings I took copious notes. When I began thinking of writing this novel, I found my box of legal pads and knew immediately I had a great start. But still there were many questions I hadn’t answered, particularly about testimony involving eight schoolboys who had disappeared in the 1980s. During the hearings, a South African security officer admitted to kidnapping and murdering these boys. When I returned to South Africa in 2024 for my research, my goal was to find this recorded testimony. I met a South African historian and when I began describing the testimony, he appeared confused. “Which set of boys was this?” he said. I realized only then that entrapping young children and murdering them was not an anomaly for the Apartheid government. I didn’t think I could still be surprised and horrified, but there I stood.

DWF: I was raised in small-town Texas, more Friday Night Lights than Maus, and after college, I moved to Paris to get to know that side of my family and of myself. I had lunch with my maternal grandmother every Friday. One noontime, she gave me a trunk filled with all the letters she and my mother had exchanged between 1957, when my mom first moved to the US, and the nineties, when their correspondence tapered off. Those lunchtime conversations and the letters are the genesis of The New Internationals.

The conversations led to other ones, with varied folks from the various branches of my family tree—in the US and France and Benin, West Africa, where the kingdom of Dahomey had been situated.

The most surprising thing—and disquieting, too—that I learned during my research had to do with the role that Africans played in the slave trade. In the movie Roots—which had shaped my understanding of slavery while I was growing up—a white slave raider, with his African lackeys, captures Kunta Kinte. In researching the kings of Dahomey, though, I learned that it was Indigenous armies, like those my great-grandfather and his forefathers had commanded, who’d rounded up and sold the majority of the Africans who would be enslaved in the Americas.

When I met my African grandfather—a son of Behanzin, the last king of Dahomey—I asked him point-blank about the role our forebears had played in slavery. He was in his nineties at the time, and he peered at me, completely unabashed, then raised an arm and turned his wrist.

“Because the fingers of the hand are not of equal length,” he explained, as though to say that this was just how it was—just the natural order of things.

I respected my grandfather, but that seemed a wholly unsatisfactory answer.

TO: I would say the thing I was most surprised by was the ending of the book or where I’d arrived at when I was done with the drafting. There was so much “the Internet is bad/making us dumber/eroding our critical thinking faculties” swimming in my head throughout and, in my fiction, I’m more at home with the downbeat ending than the upbeat one, but it wasn’t until I finished that I looked back, through the research, through the essays, and saw the little islands of hope and humanity that persisted amidst the toxic sludge. People are still showing up to resist oppressive government forces, people are still reading books and despite all the evidence to the contrary, there is still kindness in online spaces. Somehow, all of this persists.

 

You write about, and give voice to, Black experiences. How do you choose the experiences and history you incorporate into your work?

LFS: Yes, I give voice to the Black experience, which is one of the most rewarding aspects of what I do, but my stories also give readers access to the entire world. To me, writing the “Black experience” means seeing the diverse world in which my characters live, whether it’s a lovely romance with an Indo-Trinidadian, or a friendship with an Afro-Swede, or living in Montana with the Crow people. I insert Black people where we know they have been, but whose contributions were never considered, never preserved, or actively erased from historical records. I am not interested in the kind of historical biographical writing others are doing so well, about people who are unusually accomplished or who would have been famous but for societal impediments. Rather, I am interested in everyday people, people like my grandmother who I wrote about in my first novel, ’Til the Well Runs Dry, who emigrated to the United States alone; or people like Rosa Rendon from Book of the Little Axe who had to run from her island home to the American “wild west” as colonial powers threatened to take her family’s land; or people like Prudence Wright who want to live a simple suburban mom life in Maryland when an old acquaintance shows up and reminds her that she cannot outrun her past. Ordinary people and their ordinary lives upended are fascinating subjects to me.

DWF: I’m interested in exploring Americanness. Necessarily then, I explore the too often, under-recognized contribution of Black folk to our broader cultural identity. That sounds headier than it actually is or than I am capable of. I’m not trying to write dense intellectual history. Rather, I want to tell a good story—but one that directly addresses our complicated national story.

So, in giving voice to Black experiences, particularly undertold stories, I hope that I am expanding our understanding of the African contribution to Americanness. And, because the cultural blending at the heart of Americanness is so tangled, the stories that I’m drawn to tend to be ones that illuminate our mixedness.

Given that we, as a society—particularly in these trying times—are having difficulty recognizing and acknowledging the ways in which we are interconnected and interdependent, I think it all the more important to put those stories out there now.

I mean, the current president of the United States just posted on social media manufactured images of former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama as apes. We need those stories now more than ever.

TO: In much of my fiction, I’ve kind of elided this issue, at least as regards history. Riot Baby behaved more like a survey of the modern Black American experience through the vector of the relationship with the police state, and Goliath shoots us into the future where environmental racism has reached a terminus of sorts. As far as the history, it’s all important to me, all of it necessary to tell the story of the United States. Most of my fiction begins with a question—“what if God were a young Black woman” or “if all the spaceships are filled with white people, where are the Black folk”—and I just kind of go from there.

 

This history of Black Americans is one riddled with oppression, grief, and the necessity of resilience. What is a piece of history that brings you hope or joy and you wish more people knew about?

LFS: I’m not sure this answers the question but my first time in southern Africa I decided to take a solo drive to Botswana. As I drove, moving closer to the equator, my rental car grew hotter and I soon realized I was lost. I stopped at a little shack-like store hoping to get a map or directions, perhaps even a drink. As I tried to communicate with the shop owner who spoke little English, a group of boys arrived. We began to chat and as they offered me directions, I came to understand they had learned English from listening to American R&B and rap music. They knew lyrics to songs I’d listened to as a kid and we laughed not because we had a shared experience around oppression or grief or resilience, but one of joy. This exact thing has happened to me in Genoa, Italy in 1988, in Hong Kong and in Kuala Lumpur in the early ’90s. While in Buenos Aires, on a cattle ranch, I spoke to a darker-skinned young worker who I was sure had faced the same racial hostilities I had faced while visiting her country; she was reading a translation of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Black American culture is often the best, most joyful and most healing aspects of what America brings to the world and though it isn’t acknowledged enough, I have seen it in action, felt it in action, and it never fails to bring me joy.

DWF: Darnella Frazier’s story—the seventeen-year-old who filmed George Floyd’s murder on her phone and put it out in the world. Her story was told as the arrest and trial of Derek Chauvin and the other police officers unfolded, and she was given much deserved recognition by PEN America and other organizations. But those arrests and trials weren’t inevitable; in fact, they were more anomalous than not in our history. Were it not for her, they might not have happened at all.

That day, Frazier was taking her much younger cousin—a nine-year-old—to the store for treats. Seeing the police brutalizing Floyd, she first sent her cousin inside, concerned for her safety and well-being, but stayed out there on the street herself, within a few feet of the police, and she recorded the murder. When you watch the terrible video, you can hear her protesting, trying to reason with the cops, pleading for this man’s life—her, just a child herself!

Frazier’s clear-eyed vision, her moral resoluteness, and her courage astound me. Every Black person, even young Black people, know the terrible history of how we have been policed in this country—and the risk of confronting the cops when they are doing what they do. Yet, there she stood, acting for right.

TO: I feel like “anything to do with music” would have to figure in my answer. Jazz, the Blues, rock, if any cultural output historically could be labeled as quintessentially American, it would be that family of music genres. A lot of the story of the cultural output of Black Americans feels like it has an obligation to highlight the ultimate theft, how it’s taken and commoditized and used to enrich people who aren’t Black Americans, but I do think it would be cool to know more about the music-making itself, the communities it came out of, the jam sessions. Like, where the heck does someone like Miles Davis or Jimi Hendrix come from?

 

What is a book that you think should be required reading?

LFS: This is impossible! There are so many! In Casualties of Truth, I open every chapter with a quote from a well-known activist, but the book’s epigraph is from Ida B. Wells: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” I read Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells many years ago. Given the times we’re in, perhaps grounding ourselves in our greater purpose and in all the activists who came before us, could be helpful.

DWF: Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, without question—and in general, not just for Black History Month.

She creates a new language with which to talk about a thing that has been plaguing American society since before the founding. The ages-old problem of racial distinctions and racism remains unresolved; yet, with the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, conservatives have whitewashed the history and downplay its continued negative impact.

Wilkerson challenges the myth of American exceptionalism that too often bogs down our ability to move forward by talking about caste, as opposed to merely race, and by using that lens to explore the ways in which our society has resembled others that have been characterized by structural systems of inequality, notably in Nazi Germany—a comparison that should leave even the worst naysayers uneasy.

Don’t get me wrong: We’ve done some good things as a country; we’ve made some progress. But, at heart, our ongoing struggles with inequality are not so unlike what other societies experienced, and there are lessons to be learned from those others.

Plus, Wilkerson’s book is completely and compellingly readable. Wilkerson makes a complex analysis accessible to an everyday reader.

TO: The older I get and the deeper into my learning as a writer I get, the greater my appreciation for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The literary technique at work is astounding. Its take on the subject matter is cool and all, but on a skill level?! Mind-blowing. It can feel at times like a TOOL song with its midsong time signature changes and all that, which makes sense given Ellison’s jazz background. But, yeah, you can see some of T. S. Eliot’s modernism with Melville’s sort of big romanticism and there’s that Dostoevsky in there too. And it works. All of that and more in the same book and it just works.

 

What media did you engage with while you were writing your book? Do you have recommendations for books, movies, or music you think readers of your book should explore?

LFS: I mention a few really important books in my LitHub piece published a year ago, particularly Steven Biko’s book. https://lithub.com/truth-and-reconciliation-ten-books-that-explore-south-africas-identity/. I also put together a playlist for Largehearted Boy where I explain my choices. Some of the songs are mentioned in the book, itself. https://largeheartedboy.com/2025/02/11/lauren-francis-sharmas-music-playlist-for-her-novel-casualties-of-truth/

DWF: This is not so much a recommendation as a point of reference and is going to sound very strange because it is so much the opposite of The New Internationals—a TV series as opposed to a novel; a noir about an unlikely meth kingpin in New Mexico as opposed to a love triangle in postwar Paris—but Breaking Bad. Specifically, the first season.

Let me explain: I’d been working on the novel for about two decades and was at a make-or-break juncture—by which I mean, I was very stuck and on the verge of giving up. The book was big at that point—bloated!—at about five hundred pages. The solution was obvious: to cut. But I wasn’t sure what to be rid of nor how to do it.

One day while I was wallowing in self-pity and self-doubt and wondering if, twenty years along, it was time to admit defeat, I walked away from my desk and flipped on the TV. The Breaking Bad logo featured on the playlist on the screen. I’d seen the series when it originally aired, had loved it and watched it over again, a few years after that first viewing. Given that I’d seen it twice and knew everything that would happen over the course of the entire series, I thought I could watch the first episode, maybe the second one too, and enjoy a very predictable distraction before going back to my desk.

The first season is only seven episodes long. I’d forgotten that. Apparently, a writer’s strike had forced the showrunners to re-edit that first season much more concisely than they’d originally intended. As I watched—not just the first episode but the whole first season—I was stunned by how smartly it set up what would follow.

I went to my desk the next morning and knew exactly how to move forward with my book.

TO: Attack on Titan, the anime, of course. I’d say most of the bits of culture I interacted with that directly impacted Racebook were actually video games, specifically Elden Ring, which might have maybe changed my life a little bit. Played a lot of Elden Ring while writing this book. Mortal Kombat 1 and Cyberpunk 2077, too. As far as music, I listened to a lot of Morokiri, ndls404, Exyz, Yoshumidzu, that kind of stuff. Stumbled across these YouTube megamixes and was hooked.

 

Who are two authors, dead or alive, that you would invite to dinner?

LFS: If both felt unguarded, Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison would be a freaking riot to watch at my dinner table! I can see them now, laughing, drinking red wine, smoking cigarettes, and leaning in to whisper conspiratorially. I would only hope to understand how they dug inside themselves so deep and managed to pull out the world.

DWF: These two authors are probably predictable to the point of cliché, but James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

Baldwin brought me to writing. I began reading his work just after graduating from college and was so wowed, by his life as much as by his work, that I wanted to try to follow his example. I moved to Paris in December 1987, hoping to become a writer—and also aiming to travel to Saint-Paul de Vence, where he lived in the south of France, with the goal of meeting him. On my second day in Paris, I read of his death in Le Monde. Argh . . .

I actually did have the occasion to dine with Toni Morrison once. Audrey Petty—a dear friend and a beautiful writer—and I were at a small conference—maybe fifty people—at the University of Chicago, organized by the literary critic Homi Bhabha and focused exclusively on Beloved. Audrey and I were two of very few Black folks there, and the other conferees were overwhelmingly literary critics, like Bhabha, and the talks were all way over our heads.

Toward the end of the second and last day, Bhabha announced that there was a surprise guest, and it was Morrison! Needless to say, everyone swamped her. Audrey and I, feeling out of place and a bit overwhelmed, decided to go straight to the open bar, in the dining room, satisfied to at least have been in proximity of our literary hero. We elbowed up to the bar and ordered G&Ts and in walks Toni Morrison, a mass of scholars buzzing around her. She paused in the entranceway, gauging the room, and spotted Audrey—who has this warm, completely earnest face. Morrison beelined toward us.

I stuck close to Audrey and followed her and Morrison to a table and, along with seven others lucky enough to claim the remaining empty seats, listened as Audrey and Morrison had this great, engaging conversation.

TO: Victor Serge and John Le Carré.

 

Tell us about a book or author that made you want to be a writer.

LFS: Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things is a masterpiece. This book ranks pretty darn high for me in writing goals I’m hoping to reach, but it was Mama Day, a love story that many might say is rooted in “magical realism” by Gloria Naylor, which made me see writing was possible for me.

DWF: There are so many, but Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man was the first. I don’t love all the stories equally, but a few brought me to my knees—notably, “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” for the nuanced complexity of its characters and also for the way in which it brings Paris to life.

TO: Discovering Alexandre Dumas was Black in high school is a canon event, but I’d say John Le Carré’s the first writer whose oeuvre I developed a relationship with. He was the first author wherein one book was not enough or two or three. I had to read everything he had written. Robert Jordan and Dumas made me want to write. Le Carré made me want to do it for the rest of my life.

What are you reading now, and what made you pick it up?

LFS: I first read the poet Kei Miller’s Things I Have Withheld during Covid. I remember being stunned by these essays—the rawness, the honesty, and the humor. The language is beautiful and the fact that Kei is grappling with Caribbean culture, queerness, Blackness, and living in America, makes me want to sit down with it again. If I’m being honest, I’m not finding many books I love these days, and I don’t think it’s the books—I think it’s me. It’s a wild and hard time to be alive in America. As a former lawyer who believed deeply in the potential for the rule of law to make us better, I am also mourning. So . . . to avoid losing my interest in books that I read for pleasure (as opposed to work), I have decided to revisit books that have given me sustenance over the years. My list is prepared and I’m ready for a little whimsy and love and care and magic. That’s what books do for me.

DWF: Jonas Khemiri’s The Sisters. There’s a hint of Gabriel García Márquez in the novel’s sense of wonder and in its sweeping and serpentine sentences. Once I started, it was impossible to put the book down.

TO: I’m currently reading for a professional obligation, but once that is done, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob has been screaming at me on my shelf to be read. I got the Fitzcarraldo Edition years back and it’s been beckoning me ever since. I can’t wait.