I was to have reviewed this novel for the annual Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize longlist celebration, but the review copy didn’t arrive until a couple of days before the shortlist was announced and I couldn’t read it in time. However, Derek Owusu’s Borderline Fiction made it through to the shortlist, so I had the time to enjoy it before the winner is announced on May 13. The Dylan Thomas Prize is open to writers in English under the age of 39 (Thomas’ age at his death). It always throws up an eclectic mix of books covering all the bases and is one prize I follow with interest each year.
Derek Owusu is an award-winning writer and poet from North London, his mother came to England in the 1980s from Ghana. He won the Desmond Elliot Prize for his first novel, That Reminds Me, which was the first novel from Stormzy’s imprint Merky books. The novel was written as a response to Owusu being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder for which he had been hospitalised. His second, Losing the Plot, inspired by his mother’s immigration story, was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2023; he was picked as one of Granta‘s Best of Young British Novelists that year too. His latest novel explores what it is to be a young black male in contemporary Britain alongside mental health themes.
The novel follows Marcus at nineteen and twenty-five years old, alternating between the two timelines to compare and contrast his life then and now. It’s cleverly done, showing us how Marcus has grown into adulthood, but not everything changes. It begins at 25:
So, yes, I was in love again, losing balance, stumbling towards an earlier phase of my life. It was a moment I thought I knew, one I thought I could distinguish from my grazed and swollen knuckles as I fought back vertigo, the peak of a desert where a person became a thing. I remember I was still, stood staring at the girl who had just walked into the hall. […] I fell in love like I had never known the feeling, like the sudden intimation that the presence of God was real. So I tried to imagine a life before her, before this moment, but then the vision came back to me and I could feel truer words trying to find me, concussive sentences falling over themselves to reach me.
Turns out that Marcus is at a speed dating event at university. We discover her name is San during our next visit to 25. but in between we cut to 19:
You know what, I never thought to work in a gym before you know, like, I never thought it was a job a man could do, which is a weird one for me because I’ve been banging gym since I was like 10 or 11, tryna look like Ahmad Johnson and them man…
You immediately see the difference between the young Marcus, full of himself, talking in more in the vernacular. He’s managed to qualify as a personal trainer, which gets him out of the grunt work at the gym (upselling ‘shit protein bars’ and the like). At 19, Marcus is into drugs and hook-ups, but he soon falls for his friend and fellow PT Anton’s client Adwoa, and they start dating.
You soon begin to see similarities between the two ages, the drug-taking, the counting steps (not for exercise) and repeating actions a number of times, but Marcus at 25 is more controlled over his anxieties, (0.25 of a Xanax to take off the edge and no drinking with it). He’s at uni in Manchester, but lives a train ride away in Bolton, ‘a place I loved in the evening but couldn’t hold eye contact with in the light.’ Home after the speed dating event, he contemplates his situation.
Loneliness means you don’t have to disappoint anyone until you develop the habit of talking to yourself.
There’s an air of sadness that pervades this novel. Young Marcus reacts against the world, not wanting to be like his drunken father, with whom he has a fractured relationship. When Adwoa gets pregnant, he can’t handle it and snaps, he doesn’t want to be a father.
As the novel progresses, Marcus in both timelines gets increasingly closed-in and speaks from his interior. The twenty-five timeline in particular shows his his vulnerability uncomfortably closely, in intense, almost poetic prose. How and whether Marcus survives to come to terms with his fragile mental state, I won’t say.
As I said, young Marcus has that boyish swagger still, and his speech is peppered with Jamaican patois common in London slang. As a white, sixty-something woman, I had to look some of it up (e.g. ‘bedrin’ – comrade/brother, and ‘wagwan’ – ‘Wassup!’),
Owusu leaves plenty unsaid between the lines of this intense and personal novel which I found a compelling read. Although I’ve not read any of the other shortlisted novels, I can see this original and powerful one winning the DT Prize for Owusu this time.
Source: Review copy from the publisher – thank you.
Derek Owusu, Borderline Fiction, Canongate 2025, 292 pages. BUY at Waterstones or Amazon UK (affiliate links)
