There are books one enjoys and then there are books that feel urgently timed, emotionally incisive and spiritually arresting. For Such A Time As This by Shani Akilah belongs emphatically in the latter category. A four star read that I consumed in a single evening, this collection of short stories functions as both literary witness and intimate confessional, charting the psychic, professional and personal terrain of Black British womanhood during one of the most turbulent periods in recent history.

Set against the backdrop of 2020 and 2021, Akilah situates her narratives within a Britain convulsed by the Covid pandemic and the racial reckoning sparked by the global resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. The so called black squares summer is not merely referenced as cultural shorthand but interrogated with acuity and moral complexity. Corporate diversity statements ring hollow, Slack channels buzz with performative allyship and Black women once again find themselves bearing the exhausting labour of explanation, restraint and self preservation.

The titular story, For Such A Time As This, is the emotional keystone of the collection. Its depiction of a Black woman navigating the British corporate sphere is rendered with devastating precision. The microaggressions are not cartoonish but banal and therefore more brutal. Meetings where her competence is subtly undermined, colleagues who stumble through conversations about race while expecting absolution, the crushing fatigue of being simultaneously hypervisible and invisible. Akilah captures the simmering rage, the private tears, the slow accrual of disappointment with prose that is restrained yet ferocious. For readers who have occupied similar spaces, the recognition is visceral. This is not abstraction. This is lived experience rendered into literature.

What elevates the collection beyond social commentary is its emotional breadth. Alongside professional disenchantment sit stories of grief that feel cavernous in their sorrow, meditations on love that are tender without sentimentality and explorations of illness that refuse euphemism. The inclusion of Sickle Cell is particularly affecting, treated not as narrative ornamentation but as a life shaping reality that inflects intimacy, ambition and mortality. Akilah writes bodies with honesty and dignity, allowing pain to exist without spectacle.

Her prose is supple and assured, capable of lyricism without indulgence. She possesses a remarkable sensitivity to interiority, tracing the labyrinthine pathways of thought that accompany heartbreak, fury and hope. Silence in her stories often speaks as loudly as dialogue. A paused email draft, an unanswered text message, a woman staring at her laptop after a meeting that has hollowed her out. These moments accumulate into something profoundly resonant.

There is also pleasure here, which feels radical in itself. Black women in crisis are so often portrayed as perpetually resilient or endlessly suffering. Akilah grants her characters humour, sensuality, longing and reprieve. Romance flickers amid uncertainty. Friendships offer sanctuary. Private rituals of self care and indulgence become acts of quiet rebellion against a world that demands too much.

To begin 2026 with this book felt not only apt but galvanising. For Such A Time As This insists that literature remains one of our most potent tools for reckoning with recent history, particularly when that history is still tender, still raw and still unfolding. Akilah does not seek to tidy the chaos of those years into neat narrative arcs. Instead she preserves their dissonance, their grief, their fury and their fragile beauty.

This is a collection that speaks to the Black British corporate worker who survived those years by swallowing indignities and swallowing fear. It speaks to anyone who grieved in isolation, who fell in love through screens, who wondered whether institutional promises of change would ever crystallise into something substantive. Most importantly, it speaks with rather than about its subjects, an act of literary generosity that should not be underestimated.

Shani Akilah has written a work of considerable emotional intelligence and sociopolitical acuity. For Such A Time As This is not simply a book to be admired. It is a book to be felt, argued with, highlighted and passed to friends with urgency. A compelling, cathartic and exquisitely observed start to the reading year, and one that confirms Akilah as a writer of formidable perceptiveness and grace.