Derek Owusu’s third, beautifully radical novel Borderline Fiction is unsparing in its evocation of a life in schism. His narrator Marcus speaks in alternating chapters that witness his experiences at 19 and 25 respectively. These two distinct, but equally poetic voices shift and shimmer over time. At 19, Marcus is a personal trainer in North London, cramming down protein-heavy meals and deadlifting to infinity, with cocaine as his constant companion. His love for Adwoa, one of his gym’s clients, is confronting. She scratches at his silence, but he often slips through the cracks of conversations, behind sofas or into club backrooms. His childhood has many unspoken fractures, from his Ghanaian parents leaving him with a white foster mother, to the strain of navigating this country as a young black working-class…
