Q&Q asks three of the year’s most exciting debut authors to share the books that inspired them and what’s on their reading lists now

BY SUE CARTER

Rebecca Fisseha

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALIA YOUSSEF

Téa Mutonji

Zalika Reid-Benta

Rebecca Fisseha

In her debut novel, Daughters of Silence (Goose Lane Editions), Toronto playwright and former high-school English teacher Rebecca Fisseha explores life in the Ethiopian diaspora through her character Dessie, an independent-minded woman grieving the loss of her mother. Dessie finds herself unexpectedly back in Addis Ababa, where she must face some dark family secrets.

An early promoter of Fisseha’s writing was Kerry Clare – author, Pickle Me This blogger and founder of the book-recommendation service Briny Books. She told Q&Q that Daughters of Silence is “jarring, set apart in its boldness, audacity, and especially its style. It’s also the kind of novel that is best appreciated when read at least twice, because the narrative is a puzzle, and it only gets more interesting the closer you look. I’ve never read anything else quite like it.”

QQ: Growing up, what books were you drawn to?

RF: Memory is fickle, so the only way to answer this is to refer to the most ancient item on my bookshelf: a palm-sized blue notebook. On its cover is a partially peeled sticker of a red rose, a relic from the tiled walls of the bathroom in my childhood home in Addis Ababa. My mom bought me the notebook when I was in second grade to record the books I read.

One of the luckiest accidents of my life was to have been born to avid readers. Between the shelves of the Addis Ababa University Kennedy Library where my mom worked, the borrowing library at the British Council in Addis Ababa, and the stash my dad would bring from his travels abroad for work, I was set.

The first entries in the notebook show Ethiopian folk tales, translated abridged classics (mainly Russian, for some reason), fairy tales from all over, and the occasional “how things work” type of book. Later, I start to see evidence of the Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley High, Nancy Drew, and, a little heartbreakingly, a whole string of teen self-help.