Before We Hit The Ground by Selali Fiamanya

 ‘Love was a tightrope between freedom and control. He didn’t know how others seemed to walk it with ease’ Elom can’t make sense of love. It’s like a language he can’t speak, though he’s heard the words before.

He wants to feel understood – by his well-meaning yet misapprehending family, his self-assured partner Ben, and his boisterous friends – but he never knows the right thing to say. How can you know yourself, in a world that’s constantly changing? Set across Ghana and Scotland, this is an intimate portrait of one man’s search for belonging, a family’s attempt to love, and the choices that make a life.
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'A moving and masterful debut… tells an untold story that tenderly treads the lines of tradition and modernity, love and loss, courage and fear, and hope and despair. It will stay with you long after you finish it' - JJ Bola
'Brilliant… a moving, empathic reckoning with the cost and contradictions of self-making in a world of unknowns. I read it in one enthralled sitting' - Peter Scalpello