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Grow Where They Fall
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  • Published: 14 March 2024
  • ISBN: 9781405963060
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00

Grow Where They Fall

Formats & editions
Paperback
24 June 2025
Audiobook
14 Mar 2024
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From the acclaimed author of Hold: a beautifully written, spirited and deeply moving novel about a young man coming to terms with his past and finding the courage to expand the limits of who he might become

Bright and precocious ten-year-old Kwame Akromah knows how to behave. He knows the importance of good manners, how to stay at the top of the class and out of the way when his mother and father are angry with each other. But when his charismatic cousin Yaw arrives from Ghana to live with the family while he looks for work, the rules Kwame has learned about the world can no longer guide him.

Twenty years later, Kwame is a secondary-school teacher, popular with his students and depended on by his friends. His is a life spent elegantly weaving between the classroom, the labyrinth of Grindr politics and increasingly intermittent visits to his parents' home. Behind the confident façade, however, he is as driven by caution as he was as a boy.

But when electrifying changemaker Marcus Felix is appointed as headteacher, Kwame must reckon with himself as he never has before. Can he face the ghosts of his childhood? How will he learn to move through the world without losing who he is? And where does existing stop and living begin?

Grow Where They Fall is a beautifully written, spirited and deeply moving novel about a young man finding the courage to expand the limits of who he might become, from the acclaimed author of Hold.
  • Published: 14 March 2024
  • ISBN: 9781405963060
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00
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Praise for Grow Where They Fall

Donkor is a real talent

Sarah Winman, author of Still Life

His work has an immediacy and a warmth to it and his is a world you want to enter

Jackie Kay, Ten most important BAME writers working in the UK today

Hugely enjoyable and very moving, Donkor's frank, clear-eyed and funny prose is so refreshing - an important voice in contemporary British fiction

Diana Evans, author of Ordinary People

A refreshing and beautifully observed queer narrative that centres someone who is, like many of us, simply seeking joy in a world we are not responsible for

Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk

I loved every shining moment. In this radiant, deeply felt novel, Michael Donkor offers us the complexities of modern life - messy love, aching loss, our capacity for forgiveness, dignity and self-acceptance - with all the grace and fluent clarity of a singular, open-hearted storyteller

Guy Gunaratne, author of In This Mad and Furious City

Donkor is a master-weaver, threading together a story rich in layers and nuance. The characters are bursting out of their restraints to find what truly suits them. Beautiful, generous story-telling, compelling characters and so much delicious depth

Olumide Popoola, author of When We Speak of Nothing

Elegant ... An author confident of his storytelling skills, and rightly so

The i

An elegant coming-of-age tale about confronting the ghosts of our childhood, queer love and finding the courage to live a bigger and better life for ourselves

The i, Best New Books to Read in March

Donkor revels in the detail of everyday life in this languorous coming-of-age novel ... Donkor both rejects many of the knee-jerk pieties about race while lending his story an easy, conversational intimacy. A novel that glows with the ache of being alive

Daily Mail

A clever braid of two periods in the life of Kwame Akromah ... Insightful ... Detailed with convincing and often devastating precision ... Although Grow Where They Fall is concerned with revealing how adult anxieties are formed in childhood, Donkor avoids the trap of casting thirty-year old Kwame as a passive victim ... There's an element of breakthrough, a hint of A Room of One's Own at the novel's end

Literary Review

Subtle and illuminating

Financial Times

A perfect book to read in Pride month ... This book will strike a chord with everyone who reads it

Go Media Press

Deftly interweaving the stories of two big reckonings in Kwame’s life – first as a 10-year-old and again two decades later – this coming of age tale about queer love and the ghosts of our past deserves to be treasured widely

inews, The 14 most underrated books of 2024