Dana Czapnik, Black Death novels, Imani Perry on Corregidora

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Dana Czapnik's debut novel The Falconer has drawn comparisons to The Catcher in the Rye. She tells Mariella why her basketball playing heroine Lucy was born out of a frustration at the lack of female coming of age stories. Madeleine Bunting reveals the book she'd never lend, a classic children's novel which helped shape her worldview at an impressionable age. James Meek and Oisin Fagan discuss their recent novels which both feature the Black Death as their backdrop and reflect on the contemporary resonances the period evokes. And Imani Perry, Professor of African American studies at Princeton University, celebrates the seminal novel Corregidora by Gayl Jones. This 1975 work is generally accepted to have paved the way for Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, and is being reissued as a Virago Modern Classic.