Another gorgeous book by Nelson, following on from Nelson's debut Open Water this does not disappoint.

Small World centres around music, family, history and love and the narrative has got such melody and rhythm to it that you get really swept up and I found it hard to put the book down. Set over 3 summers, Small World follows Stephen as he learns to navigate life through longing, disappointment, love and loss.

Nelson is an absolute auto-read author for me and this latest work only adds to this.

I really enjoyed this book following Stephen as he enters adulthood. A great read, full of life, music and friendship, as Stephen comes to learn about love and life. A great read.

Tender, poetic and lyrical. This novel about the beauty and freedom of dance and music and the importance of art through transitional periods in life.

This was a beautiful book, joy to read.

★★★★☆ (4.5)

This is extraordinarily beautiful. I was welling up for most of the second half and only stopped myself so I was able to keep reading.

This is somewhat similar to Open Water but also so different; Nelson clearly has mastered his own literary voice and every page is full of beautiful, vivid imagery and description. For a book who's main character frequently disparages language as a burden and a cage with which he cannot voice his feeling, Nelson has no issue. Small Worlds is also more plot-driven than Open Water in my opinion (and I did read that about a year ago, so forgive me if I'm misremembering.) While both follow two young Black men and their ongoing struggles with relationships and love, both are intertwined with the sense of identity - how do they identify as Black men in South-East London, as Black men in a still systemically racist country, and how does that interfere with their every day lives.

Small Worlds takes it one step further for me - yes, on the surface, this is a romance. But at the heart of it, this is much more about identity and Stephen, the main character, trying to find his balance within himself, as any eighteen year old coming out of school and going to university tries to find what is next for them. For Stephen this also involves finding his identity in his culture; he was born and raised in London but his parents moved from Ghana, and so, he is in a completely different space to the one his father was in at his age, and all the tension that arises from that.

Small Worlds very much felt like a small world; you open up this book and you are in it, wholeheartedly.

🌍 REVIEW 🌍

Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Publishing Date: 11th May 2023

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Stephen is just finishing school, hoping to study music and immerse himself further in the world of jazz. Small Worlds follows him through the following years, his relationships with family, friends, and partners, his commitment to being himself, and most of all, his love for music.

Like Open Water, this book was raw and emotional in every word. It isn’t often that young black men are portrayed as emotional and vulnerable, and this is something Azumah Nelson manages to capture without it feeling forced or unrealistic. The lyrical writing, an ode to the central theme of music, only adds to the emotion, with repeated phrases all throughout, bringing back those same feelings at each step of Stephen’s life. And the focus of community, in all senses of the word, whether that is friends or family, or even strangers on the street, just anyone you share your life with, and the impact they have. The relationship between a father and son, pushed to its limits by the circumstances of life. I just loved it all.

One I would recommend to everyone.

I’ve just finished Small Worlds by acclaimed Open Water author Caleb Azumah Nelson. And he’s created another evocative, rich and emotional novel.

Set in South London in the early 2010s, the story follows Stephen, a young Black man navigating the complexities of establishing a distinct identity from his parents while maintaining a strong relationship with them. Nelson brings together broad themes exploring grief, slavery, generational trauma, love, community, family, faith, and freedom.

It was a nostalgic tour around the areas I used to live around the same time the novel is set; Deptford, Peckham, New Cross and their rich food, music and cultural scenes.

Many of the characters struggle with the limitations of language in expressing their emotions, resorting to alternative forms of expression such as art, music, dance, and cooking: “I have always turned to sound; how a croon can signal heartbreak or a yell can speak to our elation, or a groan might speak our grief. Music, rhythm, undeniable. Sound helps us get closer to what we feel”.

I do appreciate a complex character but I found the seesawing between the inability to articulate feelings to the delivering of impassioned speeches about inner emotional experiences a bit of a roller-coaster and it made it harder for me to grasp the characters.

The prose often used a style of repeating and looping phrases, and while occasionally it was affected, it was effective in creating a musicality to the writing.

It’s a novel packed with music, creating a soundtrack to Stephen’s summers. I found myself reaching for Spotify every few pages to swap to a new song and artist: Fela, J Dilla, Tony Allen. I hope there’s a playlist released as there was for Open Water (Tip: search Open Water Official in Spotify playlists)

The book is released 11th May and I predict it’s going to be a popular summer read.

Another beautifully written book about young Black people in London. I love Caleb’s writing style and how he delivers the story. This book will make you laugh and cry,

This is the story of Londoner Stephen, the son of Ghanaian immigrants, and his relationships with his local community, family and friends. It's a lovely coming-of-age story. At the beginning, Stephen, and his friend Del, want to go to the same music college, but only Del is successful, and they lose tough with each other. The story focuses on Stephen's life and how he gets to a place where he is happy through unexpected paths. It's a very contemporary novel, including racism and gentrification over the generations; demonstrating the changes that have happened in London over the last 40 years.
There is a nice concept where some chapters end or lead with dancing. Stephen's father is strict with him, but loves music and dancing and they bond over this. I recognised the music of his father's era, and will listen to some of the new musicians who are described so beautifully.
Highly recommended.

Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson opens at the beginning of a hot summer that will change everything for our narrator, Stephen, and his friends; school is finished, capturing that moment between childhood and adulthood with all its uncertainty and potential, and the future is both frightening and exciting. By the end of this summer and the subsequent two summers - each transformative in their own way - dreams will have been both achieved and dashed, love will have been found and lost, friendships will have shifted and family histories will have emerged, reunions will happen, and debilitating loneliness and devastating losses will have been endured.

This is a novel that has deep love, in all its complexities, at the heart of it; love between friends, love between family, love between siblings, and love between parents. As our narrator’s own experience with blossoming love unfolds, we see his observations and contemplation of his parents’ love, tied in with their roots in Ghana. One of my favourite things about Nelson’s writing is his knack for imbuing the smallest, simplest, quietest moments with a rare beauty - a cheek resting on a cheek, a finger gently brushing off an arm, the light hitting someone’s skin - and also his narrators’ abilities for seeing beauty in the people around them; not a superficial beauty but a beauty that emanates from their very person in the small moments. This pure beauty observed and experienced, meditations on love, and the rhythms of life are just some of the qualities ingrained in Nelson’s way of writing that make it quite unique, and such a joy to read. His fluid, gentle, melodic writing, and the use of repetition, often evokes spoken word. Music, once again, is also at the heart of this novel, exploring the power of both music and dance when we have no words, and where no other solution exists; the strength gained through music in the face of injustice; the spaces where faith and music offer alternate sources of resilience, and where they merge.

For all the love and beauty, there are also a lot of darker and more difficult themes addressed, including racial injustice, plummeting sense of self, and the pressures on young people in particular to find their place in this world. Stephen navigates a difficult relationship with his father, exploring the challenges faced, and sacrifices made by, immigrants, often bringing with them the pressure of expectations for the next generation, and often also bringing up the cyclical nature of family histories; exploring how families can be torn apart, but also unified, through grief; exploring the importance of following our own hearts in life.

A beautiful and heart-wrenching book; a read that is at once tender and powerful.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for my eARC.

“It’s here, when I’m with her, I know that a world can be two people, occupying a space where we don’t have to explain. Where we can feel beautiful. Where we might feel free.”


I have a confession to make - I didn’t like ‘Open Water’, when it felt like everyone else did. I could appreciate the lyricism of the prose, but the story felt too rambling despite its brevity, and I found it difficult to find any element of the story that resonated with me. Whilst I have seen similar criticism levied at ‘Small Worlds’, I loved it.

Stephen is a young black man living in London. The intensely poetic first person narrative follows him through three summers in the capital, as he tries to carve out a life for himself in that transitory period between education and the ‘real’ world. So many things are explored in the process; the possibility of love, migration from Ghana to England, racism, finding your own identity, loss and grief, relationships between fathers and sons… I could go on.

Although the narrative was sprawling and seemed to lack a driving force, I found myself inexplicably drawn to Stephen’s small world. Azumah Nelson did a fantastic job at rendering details so vividly I felt like I was escaping from reality every time I turned the page. Music is a motif running throughout the story, and we have snippets of gospel church goers, all night DJ raves, and more intimate moments of young lovers deftly spinning a record into the small hours. Azumah Nelson cleverly mirrors this lyricism in his own prose, repeating certain phrases like a refrain and allowing the story to develop in flourishes and with stylistic curlicues making it even more magnetic and mesmerising for the reader.

In the acknowledgements, he author thanked his friends for encouraging him to go deeper where they knew he could, and this is exactly what I felt here. The world he crafts may be small, but it is so, so perfectly formed.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC I received in exchange for an honest review!

I absolutely loved Open Water when I read it two years ago, and was very excited about Caleb Azumah Nelson’s second book.

This follows the story of Stephen, a young Black man living in London, over the course of three summers in his life, in both London and Ghana. It is a lyrical love letter to music, to food, to Ghana, to the ‘small worlds’ we create in our lives to protect us and to shelter us. Really beautiful.

"So instead, we build each other a small world, our solos swelling, rising like a chorus, forward as he goes back, back as he goes forward, our hands to our chests in reverence, building a church with our rhythm, a place we don't have to explain, a place where we can be honest and true; Godlike, even. A place we can both surrender."

Small Worlds follows Stephen over three consecutive and transformative summers of his life. Its summers of love and friendship, music and dance, family and food, the small worlds we create for ourselves to try and hide from the harder topics of racism, migration, loss and grief touched on through its pages.

As with Open Water, the lyrical prose throughout creates not just a novel but a playlist, a poem, a song, its own dance. This helps draw to the main focus of dance and rhythm throughout, the ebb and flow of words creating a symphony on the page. Added to this is also a tracklist of Stephen's summers, ones you want to listen to and savour as you read, to embrace the songs beating a rhythm through his head which he responds to in movement and action. Music weaves it way throughout these pages, giving an extra pulse, an extra life, a sound of Stephen's small world.

The exploration of depression and also father and son relationships and the difficulties of expressing these more intimate thoughts within ourselves was done so beautifully, so heartfelt, so honest and pure. There were sections within these moments that made me want to pause, catch my breath, and reflect on these innermost feelings and habits built within ourselves and those we're closest to.

Another fantastic novel, firmly supplanting Caleb Azumah Nelson on my auto-buy list.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin UK for this advance reader copy.

I read Open Water when it came out and enjoyed the real world storytelling and descriptions of places I myself had been to.
With Small Worlds, you’re very much following a young man’s journey through a section of his life. Through mistakes, sadness, joy and anger.

The story is beautiful and has a lot of heart which draws you into the characters and their interactions.

Overall, I think if you loved Open Water this book will also be a good read for you.

Caleb is one of my favourite writers. There is such beauty, tone and poetry to their writing. The pacing is perfection. Their writing on modern dating is true to life, in the unpredictablity and all consuming nature of relationships.

I have little in common with the narrator of Small Worlds - Stephen is a young black man living in London, while I’m an older white woman - yet his story, set over three consecutive summers kept my attention throughout, and I grew concerned about how he would navigate his way into adulthood. . His life is one of community, music, dance and love of traditional Ghanaian food as he negotiates love and loss against a background of racism and a pervasive threat of potential violence. Friendships, and family relationships dominate as well as Stephen trying to establish a sense of belonging - a small world - where he can feel safe and free in a country where he doesn’t always feel seen or welcome.

Written in the first person, there is, I think, some attempt to mimic the rhythm of music and/ or poetry at times, with the repetition of phrases - I’m not totally convinced how successful this was.

The joy of music and dance was a key aspect of Stephens life and it might have been useful for an index of the music mentioned for someone like me who was unfamiliar with many of the artists and songs.

Thanks to the publishers, Penguin, and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this.

I have waited so long for this book to come out after being completely blown away by the author's first book, Open Water. An enjoyable read but it just didn't quite reach the utter beauty of Open Water for me. I'm rounding up to 4stars

I had such high expectations for this second novel. Open Water (Nelson’s first) was my absolute favourite book of 2021, but this one kind of felt like a rerun of the same book, with a less absorbing plot. It was still a wonderful read, but maybe I was a little underwhelmed because it didn’t feel like a new experience, like it did with the first one.

What makes Nelson stand out as an author is his unique and poetic way of writing. Every paragraph feels like it could be spoken-word. You can almost hear him speaking when you read. Each page is full of eye-widening metaphors (“I walk ahead, towards the shoreline, and the sand makes souvenirs of my motion.”) and expertly-placed repetition that makes his words feel like a familiar friend.

The story follows Stephen, a young man growing up in London who is about to finish school and start university: a pivotal point in his life when it comes to choosing a future that will make his African parents proud. He has to navigate a lot of changes over 3 years, being away from his best friend for the first time, living in a new city, becoming an uncle, travelling to Ghana to learn more about his family history and, most importantly, trying to mend broken family bonds.

There is so much beautiful writing in this book, particularly in the way Nelson describes the food and music Stephen loves. Music is definitely the biggest theme throughout, showing us how it can seal memories, fill us with nostalgia, and build bonds with people we love the most. I actually searched Spotify for an accompanying playlist but it doesn’t exist yet - hopefully soon!

I’ll continue to recommend Open Water to new readers, rather than this one.

Favourite quote:

“This is the reason I have always turned to sound; how a croon can signal heartbreak or a yell can speak to our elation, or a groan might speak our grief. Music, rhythm, undeniable. Sound helps us get closer to what we feel.”

Thank you to NetGalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review. Small Worlds will be available to read from May 11th, 2023.

I could not connect with this story
I felt alien which is fine but the story did not invite me in
I could not read more than 2 chapters

Possibly a cultural challenge for me or where I am in the world or where I am at emotionally

Thank you to the publishers for access to this upcoming release!

Open Water, the authors debut novel, was one of my favourite reads last year so I was so excited to be able to read their new book! And I think I liked it even more. Nelson is such a talented writer, his words are so poetic and vivid and gorgeous. This book is so utterly beautiful. I never wanted it to end. I cried a lot by the end, it’s a very emotional and powerful book about family, love, self-discovery, music, food, life. It’s unforgettable and I can’t wait for everyone to read it.

I loved Caleb Azumah Nelson's first novel 'Open Water', but 'Small Worlds' reaches a new level. This is a stunningly lyrical novel about family, love, migration, faith, pain and joy. The small worlds in the title are the spaces characters create where they can be themselves in the midst of "a city doing its best to disappear you"; "a world can be two people, occupying a space where we don't have to explain. Where we can feel beautiful. Where we might feel free."

This coming-of-age novel unfolds over the summers of 2010, 2011 and 2012 and begins in Peckham as the narrator, Stephen, is leaving school. He is a jazz trumpeter and is hoping for a scholarship to study music, along with his (girl)friend Del. At the same time, he must carry the expectations of his parents who moved to London from Ghana when they were Stephen's age, particularly his father who "expects tangible measures of progress." Over the following three summers, we follow Stephen around London and to Ghana as he experiences disappointment, heartbreak and grief but also learns more about himself and where he came from, particularly as he reconnects with his father and discovers his story "of movement, migration, burden".

It is almost impossible to convey how beautiful the writing is. Caleb Azumah Nelson writes so lovingly about Black British experiences, in particular music ("I've only known myself in song, between notes, in the place where language won't suffice but the drums might, might speak for us, might speak for what is in our hearts"), dance ("since the one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing"), and food and drink ("food is not just sustenance but memory, nostalgia; a way to quell longing, a way to build new foundations".) Many of these phrases become refrains, repeated and refracted throughout the novel, so that even though this novel is rooted in traumatic experiences of racial violence from slavery to the London riots, it is suffused with a radiant joy, fragile but resilient. In particular, it contains some of the most incredible descriptions of making music I have ever read.

Both epic and intimate, this book is a masterpiece which deserves the very highest accolades. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.