‘This remarkable meditation on beautiful, human bodies formed by the violence of slavery and by colonial shame resists categorisation, even as it shows up the ways in which categories of race and identity are no more than empty methods of social control. Reading this book I felt a profound sense of relief: that someone as wise as Tessa McWatt had the compassion and courage to write it. Though she doesn’t spare us, her ancestors or herself, as she travels from British Guiana to China, India and Scotland, we must go with her: and realise the power of recovering female lineage, and realise that there is no centre, except the one we ourselves can make with all the various stories we contain. It is a deeply moving, urgent and important book.’
Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young
‘She is one of our greatest black female writers … She’s a deeply thoughtful woman and deeply radical in her thinking. She’s not on the fence about her politics.’
Monique Roffey, The Observer
‘Interrogating our ideas of race through the lens of her own multi-racial identity, critically acclaimed novelist Tessa McWatt turns her eye on herself, her body and this world in a powerful new work of non-fiction.’
Layla Saad, author of Me and White Supremacy
‘Superb.’
Emma Dabiri, author of Don’t Touch My Hair
‘Stunningly beautiful … Her flowing, lyrical first-person prose is as close to poetry as prose can be, deeply evocative and laden with imagery without weighing the narrative down … Deeply compelling and strikingly original.’
Becky Long, The Irish Times
‘Shame on Me offers alternative routes into black life and suggests that there’s still space for … reflections on the politics of race presented in tangential ways.’
Colin Grant, TLS
‘Executed with mellifluous scholarship and an eagle’s eye for affecting detail.’
Stephanie Sy-Quia, Brixton Review of Books
‘Heartstopping and wise, exquisitely written, compellingly told, Shame on Me rises to a crescendo of such beauty and grace in its final chapter — a call to activism and resistance — that it left me breathless with the intensity of my own listening.’
Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of Rain
‘A brave indictment, both passionate and reflective, of the category of race and the prison that identity can become.’
Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad, and Sad
‘There have been many books about race and identity in recent years, but none quite like this one. Shame On Me is part memoir, part essay, and partly a challenge to think beyond the current parameters of “identity” in our contemporary world. Told from the perspective of a writer whose own inheritance confounds established identities at every turn, it is a perceptive, poignant and deeply profound meditation on how the race-thinking of the plantation continues to structure our sense of ourselves “all the way down”. It is an essential intervention on behalf of those of us who wish to confront and overcome the resurgence of racism today.’
Anshuman Mondal, Professor of Modern Literature at UEA
‘Shame on Me is one of the most moving and intellectually profound books of its kind. As an ‘anatomy,’ it operates with surgical precision upon the necrotic legacies of race, affirming kinship and solidarity against the ongoing violence of silence and denigration. Courageously intimate and beautifully written, it is everything I admire in Tessa McWatt.’
David Chariandy, author of I've Been Meaning to Tell You
‘Poignant, provocative, beautifully written, Tessa McWatt's new memoir Shame on Me is an important, original and deeply thoughtful book. McWatt asks the toughest, most searching of questions about race and belonging and offers answers that surprise and challenge us. I loved it.'
Jill Dawson, author of The Language of Birds
‘A remarkable achievement, both for the brilliance of its ambition as well as the realisation of it. McWatt's heritage is wide-reaching and encompasses the bloodlines of both oppressed peoples as well as their oppressors. By taking parts of her body – eyes, ass, hair etc – and assessing their cultural significance and currency, she examines her life's experience through personal and global history, trying to make sense of her place in the world. Beautifully written, beguiling and audacious – a triumph.’
Henry Layte, The Book Hive
‘Her prose is lyrical and haunting ... McWatt forcefully demonstrates how we all have a stake in dismantling the status quo and creating new paths towards true freedom: “a place outside both the master’s house and the field”. Shame on Me is a tale of our time, yet also timeless.’
Shu-Ling Chua, The Saturday Paper
‘Powerful and provocative.’
Sunday Life
‘Beautifully written, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective.’
2020 OCM Bocas Prize jury citation
‘Beautifully written and courageously told.’
2020 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction jury citation
‘This is a fierce, remarkable and poetic take on racial identity.’
Susan Dale, Bad Form
‘A personal and powerful exploration of history and identity.’
The Globe and Mail ‘Books of the Year’
Praise for Higher Ed:
‘[C]ombines campus novel (historically a distinctly white-male genre) with a Zadie Smith-like sense of a thoroughly multicultural London … satirises with sharp wit the precariousness of academic life.’
The Age
Praise for Higher Ed:
‘A wryly passionate, slyly political and engrossing concatenation of London lives, that only a Londoner by choice could have written.’
China Miéville
