New Books Network

This vivid reconstruction of one man’s life reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power.

The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa (U California Press, 2025) tells the story of Nathaniel Isaacs—a nineteenth-century British Jew who helped establish the Zulu kingdom only to become a ruthless warlord and slaveholder. Isaacs’ thrilling journey begins with his shipwreck on the shores of Zululand and proceeds to ports across West Africa, including Freetown, Sierra Leone. There, tasked by the colonial governor to end the local slave trade, Isaacs brokered deals that reinforced his own power.

Adam Rovner’s meticulous archival research in England, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and St. Helena, coupled with his own travels to the remnants of Isaacs’ island stronghold in Guinea, brings this complex figure to life. Through Isaacs’ story, Rovner exposes the entangled forces of Jewish emancipation and antisemitism, slavery and abolition, the stark dichotomies of civilization and “savagery,” and the creation of whiteness versus Blackness.
Adam Rovner is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver. He is the author of In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel (New York University Press, 2014).
Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Joanna Cockerline about her acclaimed novel, Still (The Porcupine's Quill, 2025).
Longlisted for the Giller Prize, Still is the story of Kayla, who lives and works on the streets of Kelowna, Canada, and of Little Zoe, a woman working in the sex trade who is missing. Set in a vibrant and diverse community of people living unhoused, the novel explores sex work, street life, the opioid crisis, what it means to survive, and what it means to find a home-especially in one's self.
As Kayla-whose past is darker than she tells-searches for her missing friend, she also uncovers much about her own life. The novel delves into both the pain and resiliency of childhood, with flashbacks to Kayla's past with horses and how she came to be on the streets. Kayla also becomes friends with an outreach volunteer struggling with postpartum depression, alcohol abuse, and bipolar-yet who yearns to rekindle her passion for photography and share it with Kayla.
The book considers what home means, how picture-perfect lives are not always what they seem, how different forms of community are possible, and how we can tell the stories that are ourselves. It asks what it means to be missing and what we can-and cannot-go back to. Ultimately, Still is a story of community, friendship, resilience, and hope.

Joanna Cockerline is a a CBC Literary Awards prizewinner who has been published in national and international journals and magazines such as Room, The Fiddlehead, En Route, and International Human Rights Arts. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2022.
Joanna earned her BA and MA in Literature at the University of Guelph and completed a graduate program at the Humber School for Writers with two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey.
She co-authored the short story collection Seeing Our Sisters alongside Kenyan authors in The Girlship collective in 2024. She is actively at work on her next novel.
A long-time street outreach volunteer with an organization that won the City of Kelowna Volunteer Organization of the Year Award, Joanna has recently co-founded a street outreach organization dedicated to the unhoused community and, particularly, street-level sex workers.
Joanna lives with her family in the traditional, unceded Syilx Okanagan Territory of Kelowna, BC, where she teaches literature, communications, and creative writing at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan.
Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024 and was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, was released with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Founder of River Street, and the co-chair of the League of Canadian Poets BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. She is also a member of The National Book Critics Circle, The Creative Nonfiction Collective, and The Writers Union of Canada. Learn more about Hollay here.

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As the United Nations faces mounting geopolitical tensions, financial pressures, and new global challenges, what would meaningful reform actually look like? In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Fellow Peter Hoffman speaks with economist and Global Governance Forum Executive Director Augusto López-Claros about the UN’s record of achievements and shortcomings, the limits of past reforms, and the prospects for more fundamental institutional change. They discuss Security Council reform, the veto, collective security and disarmament, UN financing, climate governance, artificial intelligence, and the role of the next Secretary-General. Rather than simply making the existing system more efficient, López-Claros argues for rethinking the institutions and structures needed to address the global challenges of the 21st century.

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Conceived in 1950, the Colombo Plan for Co-operative Development in South and Southeast Asia was a unique experiment in foreign relations. Meeting annually across what we now know as the 'Indo-Pacific', talented administrators facilitated foreign aid provision, and promoted development fuelled state-making, internationalism and experimental regionalism across postwar Asia. 
In The Colombo Plan: Development Internationalism in Cold War Asia (Cambridge UP, 2025), Professor David Lowe argues that this new setting and dynamic international cast created an unusually productive diplomatic environment of development internationalism. The Colombo Plan did not escape power politics or Cold War divisions. However, it did run according to its own rhythm, and, unlike other experiments, it endured, continuing today in much reduced form.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Jeremy Harte, President of the Folklore Society, joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book Treasures on Earth: Buried Wealth in Landscape and Legend (Reaktion, 2026). The book uncovers the deep folklore of Britain's buried riches, fears, and desires. From haunted barrows to ruined castles, Britain's landscape is rich with tales of hidden treasure--stories not just of gold, but of ghosts, curses, and forbidden knowledge. Treasures on Earth gathers hundreds of these traditions for the first time, showing how folklore, shaped by local memory and longing, has imagined wealth not merely as currency, but as power, danger, and loss. These legends tell of dragons, demons, and seekers armed with spells, but also of real hopes stirred by poverty, war, and the mysteries of place. Through vivid storytelling and careful insight, this book reveals how treasure lore carries the emotional weight of history. In the end, these are stories not just about what is buried, but about why we still yearn to uncover it.

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