Author(s): Derek Owusu

Novel | Poetry

A vital and honest book exploring the pain of the immigrant experience and the turmoil it can carry across generations, from the winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize.

Driven by a deep-seated desire to understand his mother's life before he was born, Derek Owusu offers a powerful imagining of her journey. As she moves from Ghana to the UK and navigates parenthood in a strange and often lonely environment, the effects of displacement are felt across generations.
Told through the eyes of both mother and son, Losing the Plot is at once emotionally raw and playful as Owusu experiments with form to piece together the immigrant experience and explore how the stories we share and tell ourselves are just as vital as the ones we don't.

Review: 'Derek Owusu is a writer of rare empathy, intensity and allure. This brief verse novel, in untranslated Twi and various registers of English, observes the inner life of an exhausted immigrant mother, notions of cultural disinheritance, and mutable identities. Losing the Plot both recalls and expands upon classics of Black motherhood like Buchi Emecheta's Second Class Citizen and Joan Riley's Waiting in the Twilight.' - PAUL MENDEZ

'Losing The Plot is as tender as it is truthful, it is a profound and generous work of love and a salute to our mothers. Derek Owusu is such a brilliant and succinct writer and a warm and compelling story teller. This book took me home.' - SALENA GODDEN

'Losing the Plot by Derek Owusu is earthed in love, curiosity, and interlinked story of mother and son, Twi & English, Owusu takes risks with a joy that makes his prose soar! I have so much time for Owusu's voice, an inimitable talent!' - JENNI FAGAN

'Losing the Plot is a polyphonic homestone, with intertextual conduits that are funny, poignant . . . The multi-layered perspectives feel like an internal dialogue, a mind racing, foiling pace. . . There is space too, arms stretching into blank page that reveal a type of poetry that we rarely see, a poetics of scattering . . . Derek has honoured a lot of people, often uncelebrated women, by writing this book. Losing the Plot asks who was my mother before I, and who is she now? Through everything, there is music, a disco of praise, gently comforting, a sense of self that surrounds us as we move.' - TICE CIN

'In this latest work, Owusu does what all writers should aspire to. Push the boundaries of possibilities, play with style and technique, challenge both the reader and himself? Losing the Plot is confounding, heightened, intergenerational, and most of all brilliant. It presents to us a writer who will absolutely not be defined by rules; indeed, this book proves emphatically, without question, that there are no rules at all.' - COURTTIA NEWLAND

'From 'Landing' to 'Epilogue' Derek Owusu's Losing the Plot is a touching and innovative gem of a book.' - SARAH LADIPO MANYIKA

'Derek Owusu is a poet's poet, with the power to capture hearts and minds - and Losing the Plot does just that. He bares his soul in such an auspicious manner, you're immediately transported into his world and he dares you to feel what he feels. Gripping.' - ELIJAH LAWAL

Author Biography: Derek Owusu is a writer, poet and podcaster from North London. In 2016, he joined the multi-award winning literature podcast Mostly Lit. He also produced the well-received This Is Spoke podcast for Penguin Random House and Freemantle Media. He has written for the Big Issue, i and more. His essay on Black men and insecurities was the second-most read article on Media Diversified in 2018, and his essay on language was picked up by BBC Newsnight to be turned into a short documentary. He contributed to What Is Race by Nikesh Shukla and Claire Heuchan and has had poems published by the Good Journal. Derek also collated, edited and contributed to Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space. He is the author of That Reminds Me, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize.