OpinionRace This article is more than 2 years oldBeing Black and British means something else now I’m at an Ivy League universityThis article is more than 2 years oldAmandla Thomas-JohnsonThe responses to my London accent show how UK Black culture is changing perceptions in the US – but only for some I hadn’t even reached Ithaca, the tiny university town in upstate New York – my home for the next six years, as I studied for a PhD – when the confusion over my Blackness and British accent began.

Fiction in translationReviewA serial killer’s amnesia; an assassin’s success; a boy’s bond with his kidnapper … dark and funny tales reflect a changing political climateGiven that loss of memory has become a familiar device in fiction, and the psychopath such a popular character archetype, we shouldn’t be too surprised by the notion of a serial killer hero with Alzheimer’s. The title story of South Korean author Kim Young-ha’s collection is a first-person narrative with a journal structure that nods to Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, and like its Russian progenitor charts the descent into dementia of an alienated protagonist.

ExperienceLife and styleOne morning, I was alone with him in the house. He looked up at me and said, ‘Sarah, will you help me?’ In 2009 my father was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a lung cancer caused by asbestos. He had probably been exposed to it as a junior doctor; the pipes lining the staff corridors were lagged with asbestos fibre. Dad knew the prognosis of his illness: a few more months, his lungs filling with small tumours and, in the end, death by suffocation.

CultureReviewNew Roscoe, Leeds Rating: *** More reviewsGrand Drive's lovingly crafted music is rooted in downtown bars, rocky mountains and the country-rock of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. The Emmylou Harris voice belongs to singer Danny Wilson, who has the body of an extra from London's Burning, but whose feminine vocals could belong to a raven-haired Texan lady struggling through drink and divorce. Even more unlikely, the creative core of this hugely American-sounding music consists of Danny and his brother Julian, who hail from London and grew up in Australia.

Oprah WinfreySucceeding Donald Trump as US president would be an incredible climax to a true rags to riches life story that fostered her trademark compassion Oprah Winfrey was four-and-a-half years old, maybe five, when she decided she wasn’t going to have the life expected of her. She was raised on a small Mississippi farm by her grandmother, whose highest hope for her granddaughter was that when she became someone’s domestic worker, she would be treated kindly by her employers.