This was so much more than I could have hoped for, I have fallen head over heels for it.

The words have such rhythm, with the repetition of lines throughout the story feeling like the chorus of a song. With the smell of Ghanaian food permeating the story and the soundtrack pulsing its way through every page, this is a real feast for the senses. We follow Stephen over 3 summers and it really feels like we live a lifetime with him and his family. This story looks at what it means to belong; to a family, to friends, to a lover, to an employer, to the music, to a language, to a country, to yourself. Characters that you will grieve with, rejoice with and fall in love with.

Open Water was one of my favourites of 2021 and Small Worlds is now a favourite of 2023. It deserves more than the 5 stars provided.

gorgeous - no other way to describe it. have never seen someone articulate that haze between childhood and adulthood, that sense of loss, the way music is framed and the way love, grief, anger are all intertwined. a book to stay with me for a long time actually

Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds is a beautiful, eloquent exploration of love, loss and finding a place of safety for a person of colour in a white world. Beginning in 2010, the novel follows Stephen, the youngest son of a Ghanaian couple living in Peckham.
Stephen spends a glorious summer dancing and playing music with friends while waiting and hoping for news of the scholarship which will fund his university place. He and Del have been each other’s best friend for over a decade during which Stephen has fallen in love with her but is afraid to make the first move. Over the summer, Stephen’s plans for the future are thrown into disarray leading eventually to a chasm opening up between himself and his father.
From its first sentence, Nelson’s moving, heartfelt novel unfolds in gorgeously rhythmic prose. Themes of family, loss, grief and home run through it with racism a constant background hum. Characters retreat into ‘small worlds’, safe harbours of community, familiarity and love with faith, music, dance and particularly food a comfort in a harsh world. Nelson’s writing is wonderfully evocative, heartrending in its depiction of the aching sadness of grief and the damage done by fear and disappointment. He writes with such a poignant tenderness for these characters they feel like family. It ends with hope, at least for Stephen and for his father.

I want to like Caleb Azumah Nelson because he's a fairly young British writer and because I read that he used to work in an Apple store and now he's made it as a writer, but I just don't think he's good. Where I forgave Open Water for its forced lines, its maudlin prose and a certain jejuneness, Small Worlds simply continues in that vein, perhaps even heightens it. I thought his next book would feel different and read more mature, but sadly it doesn't. So, before I say what I didn't like about this book, I will say, if Open Water struck a chord for you then this will probably do the same thing. So there's that. But for me, it was all the same problems. Nelson tries to end every paragraph with some over-the-top 'poetic' line that always falls flat; he repeats lines throughout the book as if they have some sort of power but I found them to be much the same as the other trying-too-hard lines and their insistent repetitions throughout the novel only made that worse; he uses the title, the concept of us having 'small worlds' within us, around us, with those we love, frequently too, and again, it felt forced and a little pseudo-philosophical. The father/son relationship felt rushed. The romantic relationship didn't feel wholly different to what we've seen in Open Water . . . It seems like Nelson is just trying to hit the same note as his successful debut, but sadly that shows no growth. Frankly I just couldn't bring myself to care about a single thing in the book. That said, when it's published in May, I have no doubt it'll do fairly well and get good reviews from the masses. So I'll just continue grumbling under my breath in the corner of the party like some Bernhard narrator. Thanks to Penguin/Grove Press for the advance copy.

With Open Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson proved himself to be one of the best voices of today. Going into this, I was cautious and worried that what I experienced with Open Water couldn't be replicated. I was wrong to think this.

Small Worlds takes the sensitivity and poetic delivery of Open Water and threads it through the wonderful narrative(s). I've rarely felt such warmth through prose and the execution is incredibly successful.

Following Stephen’s story, we explore many kinds of loss: death, relationships, identity (and more) and seeing him deal with these issues really hit close to home.

So many references to great music throughout and I know that my summer playlist is going to be heavily influenced by the tracks mentioned here.

Give your heart a workout and read this book; love every word. Love as much as you possibly can.

This sophomore book by Nelson is highly anticipated after a huge success of Open Water. I loved OW and his poetic writing style, music references, addressing of improtant theme like institutional racism. It was a novella so short but had a lingering effect.

His writing is just as gorgeously poetic as OW, and the fans would be pleased with the writing. It’s a beautiful coming-of-age story, with focus on uncertainty and anxiety that come with youth, but also that comes with being a black man in Britain. Very similar to OW. But in this novel Nelson expanded the theme scope to include family and roots, immigration and mental health as well.

It’s a beautiful book of one’s life (small world) and connections to others (small worlds). Of love with your self, family, lovers and friends, and your community.

Still not sure how I feel about the part where it suddenly jumps many years. And I feel like Part 1 (the coming-of-age part where the characters were younger) was more poetic in OW style and the writing felt suddenly more wordy than poetic in Part 2. It might be all intentional as in Part 1 the characters are adults in the real world and could no longer live just by “feelings”. I don’t know. It just felt like Part 1 and 2 are different books.

All in all, this is a beautiful book that made me emotional and my heart ache. I think fans of OW will be satisfied😃

Another great one from Caleb!

Loved Open Water last year so was an easy choice to dive straight into his second novel.

Absolutely love his style of writing and the emotion I felt flowing through the pages. As someone who’s dealing with grief so many moments resonated and will always remember the line about “walking in the light someone has left behind”.

It’s so difficult to put into words, but Small Worlds is definitely one of those novels I’ll be thinking about for days to come and of course recommending to all!

Looking forward to seeing how it plays out on screen too!

What a beautiful and powerful story by Caleb. This story is full of immaculate poetic writing and Caleb I believe is one of the best writers in the world.

This story focuses on the life of Stephen through three summers as he makes big life decisions, suffers huge relationship break downs and sees the beauty in life through dance and music.

You can really feel the growth Stephen goes through in his life. His move to university, his trip to Ghana and it helps you realise we have all felt these feelings before.
I really enjoyed exploring the relationship of Stephen and his Father. The description of the expectations that Fathers expect of their children is so deeply emotional and harrowing and makes you think twice about whether you are making your Father proud.

This is such a powerful and important book to read and I will always recommend Caleb’s books to anyone!

Open Water was a hard book to follow but Small Worlds is just as lyrical and sensory.
It follows Stephen, the summer before he starts university in 2010 and follows him over subsequent summers. It's about him finding himself, friends, family, love and grief.
The depiction of food and music used perfectly and the poetic prose is to be savoured.

If you enjoyed Open Water, you will LOVE this book.

Caleb Azumah Nelson doesn't just write a story. It's a poem, a playlist, a song for London.

Our young protagonist navigates that terrifying act of coming of age - university. Building a place for himself where he can thrive with loved ones and grow into the person he thinks he can be. But it is never quite so simple, is it? Bring in migration, marginalisation, and intergenerational trauma. Bring in the fear of vulnerability, of being open to love, and the fear of failure.

Then drop it all in the culture capital that is London. You can feel the rhythm of the streets, the raucous noise, the vibrant colours, the smells and sounds. Bring in all the music of my young adulthood. Bring in the the smells of home cooked goodness, the memories of your mum pouring her heart and soul into feeding her family.

Bring it all together, wrap it in what is more poetry than prose, and then you MIGHT start to understand what this book is about.

This is a second book by the author I’ve read. I liked this one just as much. It was a slower character driven novel and I thoroughly enjoyed the family dynamics.

Much like the highly praised Open Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson's second novel is highly lyrical and poetically ambitious: Rendered in an intense, dramatic voice, we accompany our narrator and protagonist Stephen during three summers after his high school graduation, so in a transitory phase of life. And this motif of transit(ion) is central, as we learn about the migration history of Stephen's parents and his own journey to Ghana, his brother's path to becoming a father, and Stephen's dream of striking a romantic relationship with his friend Del and becoming a musician. All narrative strands of this coming-of-age novel relate to familial trauma and experiences of racism, particularly in Great Britain.

Music is important on the plot level: Not only because Stephen and Del are musicians and music is important for just about every character, Nelson also constantly gives the events depicted a soundtrack by referring to musicians and records. The text is also structured by repeating certain sentences like a chorus. Thus, the language picks up a rhythm that is then again reflected in the idea that dancing is the only thing that can solve Stephen's problems, which sounds poetic, but is of course nonsense: Issues like police brutality, the reverberations of the slave trade, youthful disorientation and other topics the text mentions will not be danced away anytime soon. What is meant here is that Stephen shuts himself away in his own small world, a world he intends to protect, where he knows himself in music.

Now that could make for interesting concept: A young protagonist torn between his own world - a relatable position, as we all try to build a place where we can thrive with the ones we love and feel ourselves - and the world around him. But nothing here is worked through in a stringent manner, it's a text heavily reliant on moody writing and heavy-handed plot points that treat small and big tragedies alike. Let's take Stephen's attempt to go to university: He feels lonely and out of place, and it's depicted like a Shakespearean plight. So the reader wonders: Why doesn't he act and try to make friends? Why the self-pity? And plot holes abound: When Stephen is so passionate about music, why do we hardly hear that he plays the trumpet, that he works towards performing, that he hangs out with bands, etc.?

There are some really heavy parts about intergenerational trauma, marginalization, and migration in here, but when they appear at the same level of emotional intensity as a young man who is unable to tell a girl that he likes her, it takes away from the depth of the story as a whole. Stephen, who as a second-generation immigrant is confronted with all kinds of intercultural challenges, sometimes seems like a teenager when he, who has the time and space to explore his place in the world, sounds overly dramatic about minutiae. I see that Nelson intended to show Stephen's perspective as a young person who tries to find their place in the world as a Black man in London, but the result does not quite come together: Too often, the world happens to Stephen although he would have agency, but he remains passive, and it's unclear why.

So unfortunately, I have to admit that during large parts of this very wordy text, I was rather bored, because nothing much happens, and nothing surprising happens either. I felt crushed by the over-the-top poetic language and wished for more depth: Just because the music is loud, doesn't mean it's automatically deep or particularly good.