Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - The Sunday Times Bestseller

My book of the year. It's personal, historical, political, and it speaks to where we are now. This is the book I've been waiting for - for years - Benjamin ZephaniahPart biography, part polemic, this powerful, wide-ranging study picks apart the British myth of meritocracy - GuardianAkala is at his best destroying the comfortable myths that are invoked by white fragility to downplay attempts to correct the historical record ... Akala makes it clear that he is not brimming with optimism. But reading Natives - witnessing the kind of disruptive, aggressive intellect that a new generation is closely watching - I can't help but be just that - ObserverWhat I love about this book is it's kind of like a testimony, a story of contemporary London. He is like one of the Baldwins or Hooks of our generation, who walks among us, you know? When he theorises, it's from a place of knowing rather than some distant place up above . . . He is very good at remembering and honouring the experiences that have shaped him, and he applies it in a very real way - GuardianIn his lucid, wide-ranging Natives the rapper Akala shows how race, class and the legacies of empire shape life in Britain today . . . Akala's study interweaves sociological analysis with memoir. Half-Scottish and half-Jamaican by heritage, he challenges cultural assumptions and highlights their consequences, is trenchant about structures of disadvantage, and is discouraging, in the end, about the future - TLSA potent combination of autobiography and political history which holds up a mirror to contemporary Britain - IndependentOne of the most thoughtful books of the past year - Evening StandardA history lesson of the kind you should get in school but don't ... This is a searing, thought-provoking book - Stylist