Borderline Fiction

by Derek Owusu

Loneliness means you don’t have to disappoint anyone until you develop the habit of talking to yourself

At nineteen, Marcus is young and in love … again. When his latest crush, Adwoa, starts showing him true affection, Marcus is ready to reconsider his lifestyle – the drugs, the casual encounters. At least for a little while.

Now, before he knows it, Marcus is twenty-five. And history risks repeating itself.

Told through two parallel narratives – one past, one present – Borderline Fiction is a highly original and deeply affecting contemporary tale written with an intensity of emotion and vulnerability. The novel is a close-up, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes funny examination of what it means to be a young black man navigating today’s world.

Tortured, beautiful, anxious and poetic, Borderline Fiction is a memorable glimpse into the inner world of a young man searching for an authentic way to love and be loved.'

Genres: Fiction

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 6, 2025

About the author

Derek Owusu is an award-winning writer and poet from North London.

He has written for the BBC, ITV, Granta, Esquire, GQ and Tate Britain.

In 2019, Owusu collated, edited and contributed to SAFE: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space, an anthology exploring the experiences of Black men in Britain.

His first novel, That Reminds Me, and the first work of fiction to be published by Stormzy’s Merky Books imprint, won the Desmond Elliott Prize for best debut novel published in the UK and Ireland.

His second novel, Losing the Plot, was published in 2022 and was Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and Jhalak Prize.

In 2023 he was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.

His third novel, Borderline Fiction, will be published by Canongate in 2025

Reviews

[Ben Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derek Owusu's novel, Borderline Fiction, tell the story of Marcus, a young man at nineteen and at twenty five, in alternating chapters. It is a novel full of sex and longing, an insight into black masculinity in the twenty-first century. Owusu is a very fine writer, and Borderline Fiction has an immediacy to it which is gripping from the outset. He draws Marcus with clarity on the page and allows the reader to become invested quickly.

I read fiction to be entertained, to be moved, and if I learn something about a group, an ethnicity or identity different from my own along the way it's a triumph to me. I'm not the target audience for Borderline Fiction and the life of it's protagonist is so far removed from my own - by age, race and location - but the sheer universality of it's themes meant it resonated and carried me through.

I read Borderline Fiction in one sitting - and if it's opening quotation from Kierkegaard suggested that there might be more dramatic philosophical heft to the novel than the lashings of sex that actual full it's pages - it is nevertheless a novel of depth, warmth and honesty. I loved it.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

[endrju]

I read this a while ago, but I waited quite a bit later to write a review in order to gather my thoughts. On the one hand, I care about the interiority of cisgender straight men as much as they care about queerness—probably even less, as I have no phobias, unlike them. On the other hand, this is not a typical straight story. Yes, the character narrates his sexual exploits and relationships, but he does so from the perspective of a Black neurodivergent person, which changes everything. The form and content are perfectly matched, with blocks of text and dialogue propelling the narrative toward...extinguishment. There are no fireworks or grand conclusions, but the book is all the more effective for it.

[jadyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Speaking to Derek Owusu with CasualReadersClub felt immeasurably special in a way I wouldn’t be able to describe. All I could ever say to him, in summary, is thank you.

[Claude Ilunga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read in one sitting. The voice was a throwback and thankfully didn't feel forced. Not entirely convinced if black men do this much drugs but it made sense in the story. Primarily about living with Borderline Personality Disorder (and OCD?) and something to do with time? There is a lot of (intentional?) repetition. One chapter repeats three times (with different headings) like groundhog day. Will revisit at some point.

Thanks to Canongate for the ARC in exchange for an honest review

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found a lot to admire in Borderline Fiction, the new novel by Derek Owusu, but not a lot to love.

The novel consists of alternating chapters labelled “Twenty-Five” and “Nineteen”, and we follow the same character, Marcus, falling in love at each age. Can he learn from his earlier mistakes and make things work the second time around?

The title seems to have a double meaning. “Borderline” refers to Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), which another character in the novel refers to. Marcus is taking medication for his mental health, and although it’s never specified, he seems to fit the description of BPD: unstable interpersonal relationships, acute fear of abandonment, intense emotional outbursts, self-harming behaviours, risky activities, dissociation, a pervasive sense of emptiness, and a distorted sense of self.

Borderline Fiction could also indicate that this book inhabits the borders between fiction and memoir. Owusu has spoken about his own BPD diagnosis in the past, and he also shares some characteristics and life experiences with the characters of Marcus, like being raised in foster care in East Anglia, working as a personal trainer in a gym, etc.

I liked the premise of a novel featuring BPD, something I knew nothing about before reading this. I’d heard the name before but was never sure what it meant, so I learnt a lot by following Marcus’s life at both ages and seeing the impact of BPD on his life and relationships.

I also liked reading a novel in which British-Ghanaian culture is at the centre. Both Marcus and the women he falls in love with are from that background, and it’s not a perspective you see too much in fiction. It’s reflected in the food, the culture, the conflicts with the older generation, and in the language: both the interspersing of often untranslated Twi phrases and the London lingo: “handing out leaflets in ends, taking man’s numbers, belling them and asking if they thought they’d go heaven.”

Some of the writing is beautiful, but it also tends to pack in a lot of different images that don’t always seem to fit. Here’s the opening paragraph, to give you an idea:

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.

It’s quite poetic, but what exactly is the peak of a desert where a person became a thing? It’s hard to visualise, especially since it later turns out Marcus is at a speed dating event in London. Vertigo is a familiar way of describing the feeling of falling in love, but what comes afterwards just makes it harder to situate the scene. The grazed and swollen knuckles are explained later on, if you’re paying enough attention: Marcus used to bite the skin of his knuckles, so it’s a powerful way of showing the character’s anxiety.

At other times, the poetic language disappears, and we just get pages and pages of dull and repetitive dialogue or circular arguments, with no attribution or quote marks, so that it’s difficult to follow who’s saying what.

Something told me you were hiding shit from me.
Something told you?
Yeah?
Like what?
I don’t fucking know, I just know when someone is doing me dirty, something just tells me.
Really? Something like what? Anansi?
Are you fucking dumb? Why you chatting shit? What the fuck, man?

That’s a tiny sample from a much longer argument. Then, a few pages later, we get:

What are you cooking?
Oxtail. With plantain and rice.
Just for you, yeah?
Marcus, when have I ever cooked just for me?
Oh, so for you and Michael, then?
Michael?
Yes, Michael.
Michael?
Yes, man, don’t try act dumb now. I swear, just cos man aint out here like my cousins don’t think I’m some prick.
Michael. You’re pissed off because I’ve been talking to Michael?

Again, it goes on. These arguments do serve a purpose in showing Marcus’s paranoia and inability to form relationships, but pages and pages of “Michael? Yes, Michael. Michael? Yes, Michael” add up to a tough read.

There’s lots of drug use, lots of sex, lots of partying, but it all feels achingly empty. Which, if you look back at the characteristics of BPD, is probably the point, but again, it doesn’t make for a good read. There is also quite a bit of emotional vulnerability and yearning for connection, which is when the character gets more interesting, but then the paranoia and self-destruction take over again.

Then we have the issue of spending an entire novel inside the head of someone with Borderline Personality Disorder. This is why I return to the line I started this post with: I found a lot to admire but not a lot to love. It’s worthwhile to see life through the eyes of someone with BPD, but it’s not very enjoyable. I found myself losing focus, forgetting which timeline I was in, and often not particularly caring what happened in either of them. Borderline Fiction was an interesting read, but not one I can honestly recommend. It was too uneven for me, too repetitive, too meandering.

I may well be wrong about this book, though. Courttia Newland, who I met in Barbados years ago and whose opinion I respect, said:

“The evolution of modern British literature as it lives and breathes belongs to Derek Owusu … With this novel, Owusu doubles down on everything that makes his fiction so exemplary. There are passages that took my breath away. The world, the dialect, the ideas, are all glaringly fresh and true.”

Owusu is also one of Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists” and seems to be unanimously praised by everybody in the literary world. So Borderline Fiction will probably make me look stupid by going on to win the Booker.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was during my crack up, a time when I sat watching my reflection rippling in the sea of tranquillity or skipped stones across its surface, supposed to be resting after I'd been compelled to turn away from the world and endure the horns I had thought summoned the reformers of belief, auditory hallucinations more frightening than visual because there was nothing to stop the sounds.

 
Derek Owusu’s simultaneously searing and experimental debut “That Reminds Me” – written in a series of short prose poetry almost Sebaldian verses representing fragmentary and impressionistic memory necessarily distorted through the acts of remembering and forgetting, was the winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2020, a prize that was for some 15 years the UK’s most prestigious prize for debut literary fiction.  Part autobiographical – it told the story the London-both Ghanaian-descended narrator, suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and looking back across his life including a spell in a private fostering arrangement in the countryside during his childhood.
 
His equally excellent second novel “Losing The Plot” (2023) – equally fragmentary and impressionistic mixing English with untranslated Twi and one giving the reader more of a accumulative rather than immediate comprehension   - was part of the shortlist for my inaugural Barker Prize for novels which should have at least been Booker shortlisted. In effect it was an imagined family biography of the story of Owusu’s Mum, an attempt to understand her life and her journey from her arrival in the UK (from Ghana) up to the present day. 
 
And the same year the author was included in the prestigious decennial Grant Best of Young British Novelists list – for me the most exciting author on the list alongside Natasha Brown.
 
This novel (partly but not fully auto fictional as the title hints) told in first person by a young London black man Marcus, and alternating two periods of his life – at 19 when he is working as a personal trainer at a gym, and at 25 when he is studying English Literature at the then Bolton University.  At 19 he is already (as our story begins) Adwoa – a client of one of his fellow PTs; at 25 the story beings with him attending a speed dating event at the ACS of the main Manchester University and being struck by a girl – San – whose path he then intersects with over time, San something of a black activist.
 
And in both threads he is struggling both with the legacy of his past: his placement in Foster care in Norfolk for much of his childhood, his alcohol-dependent Anansi-storytelling Father and with his own Borderline Personality disorder.  The symptoms of the latter are (literally) clinically set out in a cleverly inserted pre-Acknowledgement section extracted from the DSM; but are brilliantly explored by Marcus’s compelling first party voice and by his dialogue with those around him – but particularly Adwoa and San.
 
While the novel is at times less fragmentary/impressionistic than its predecessors – it is still a satisfyingly demanding read at times, not least due to Marcus’s complex mind.
 
I am tempted to compare the novel to David Szalay’s “Flesh” – recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize in its concentration on physical and working class masculinity – but whereas that book deliberately features a protagonist with almost no interiority, a language deliberately stripped back and a dialogue largely circling around “okay”, ”I don’t know” and “yeah” – here as the epigraph from Kierkegaard suggests, starting “sit and listen to the sounds in my inner being, the happy intimations of music, the deep, earnestness of the organ” there is a lot of interiority to complement the carnality, the language and writing is frequently poetic and at times almost transcendent and the dialogue lively and varied (and as aside Saramago like in its lack of speaker-signifiers, so requiring and rewarding close attention to the text).  
 
Black, masculine, working class North London, gyms, drug-use and sexual experimentation, mental health disorders and so on have only limited overlap with any aspects of my own life over the decades – but like the very best novels this one worked brilliantly as an empathy engine, giving me a completely new immersive understanding of a different life.
 
Highly recommended and in my view an early 2026 Booker longlist contender.

[Katy Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unsettling narrative but an excellent first-person look at young men and mental health.

You know soon after starting that Marcus has some issues. We move between Marcus at 19 and at 25, and in both timelines, he relies on both prescription and illegal drugs to function. He is clearly not in control of himself at times. Yet he remains a likeable young man, not wanting to do harm, not yet fully grown but taking on responsibility for himself and not always succeeding.

This is a 'settled' parent and worker talking, I suppose, looking back two decades at the confusions and uncertainties of the adult world for the first time. Relationships, family, work, freedom - it can be a lot to manage, even when you're supported and organised.

Marcus at 19 is working a gym. Sometimes using this location for... ahem... dates with women. Falling for someone and for once going through the stages of a longer-term relationship. Marcus at 25 is in a different place, and clearly not thriving as an adult yet.

Family history, women, friendships. He is trying to self-medicate but we can see this is not working.

This felt like a great insight into a mental health condition that isn't named, but the author finally includes a note on at the end of the story - it makes so much more sense when you see the description. The narration is unsettling jumping around from time period to time period but we do get a strong sense of Marcus and his world. His life can be chaotic at times, he makes decisions you don't always agree with.

Hardest thing for me was the language, for while Marcus is educated (college student at 25) and reads great literature, he speaks with the street language that doesn't translate well to paper if you aren't used to it. I used Google a lot for terms and while I could follow and use context cues, it did slow down my reading flow, but of course this is how Marcus speaks and makes his story that much more realistic.

The parallels and differences between Marcus at 19 and 25 are highlighted, how he has changed, and how he's still learning. And not coping. It's only a matter of time before things break down for him.

A fascinating portrayal of a contemporary young man, fighting against his own nature in a not very forgiving world.

With thanks to Netgalley for providing a sample reading copy.

[Dima · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story alternates between two time periods, with chapters titled *25* and *19*. The protagonists in each seem quite different, yet perhaps they are the same person at different stages of life. We follow him as he struggles with mental health, searching for love and happiness. Written in the first person, the narrative offers an intimate glimpse into the workings of a tortured mind.

For me, the book serves as a vivid exploration of mental illness—particularly borderline personality disorder—and what it means to live with it. The protagonist’s anguish is painful and poignant, and the author excels at making the reader feel deeply unsettled by the emotional turbulence and erratic shifts that define his life. The story contains graphic depictions of sex, drug use, and self-harm (mostly emotional, but nonetheless disturbing). The rawness of the emotion feels almost personal, leaving the impression that the book is at least partly autobiographical.

That said, it wasn’t an enjoyable read. The lack of clear narrative structure bothered me—the book was insightful but didn’t pull me in, nor did it feel like a cohesive novel. The pacing and tone were uneven: moments of beautiful language sat uneasily beside overworked metaphors, and the frequent switches between ornate internal monologue and abrupt, stilted dialogue were jarring. I also found the absence of perspective from those around the protagonist limiting. Nearly everyone he encounters is either damaged or flatly drawn. Perhaps this was intentional—to mirror the distorted perceptions of someone with BPD—but it made the story feel claustrophobic. Ultimately, I found the experience emotionally exhausting, almost punishing to read.

Overall, it’s an important book that offers meaningful insight into what living with BPD might feel like. But it’s not an easy or pleasant experience. For me, it’s a solid 3.5 stars, rounded up.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing early access in exchange for an honest review.

[Chris L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Derek Owusu's 'Borderline Fiction', he gives us Marcus at the ages of nineteen and twenty-five. Told in Owusu's lyrical and sparse style, Owusu shows how trauma and identity have a major effect on Marcus's ability to function and find his bearings in a world that is often antagonistic to him. Coming from a Ghanaian background, Owusu allows readers to see into Marcus's culture and how that offers solace as well as pain. British society usually claims to be about inclusion, but that inclusion often comes at a price: denial of your heritage. Not to put too fine a point on things, but men like Marcus can be on the borderline of society and acceptance, especially in a post-Brexit world.

Owusu's prose style is lush and performance based so I often found myself reading it out loud which helped with the reading of the novel. In its own way, the novel is a performance art piece and its fragmented style becomes a reflection of Marcus's place in society. Superbly modulated and an exciting portrait of modern-day Britain.

[John Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Borderline Fiction is a raw, poetic exploration of a young man’s struggle with love, loneliness, and self-identity. Through Marcus's parallel narratives, we see the complexity of his emotional journey, from youthful optimism to the weight of repeating past mistakes. The novel’s vulnerability and intensity are both poignant and discomforting at times, but it’s this very emotional depth that makes it memorable. The writing is sharp, and the portrayal of Marcus's inner world is both captivating and heartbreaking. A powerful read for those interested in stories that dive deep into personal and relational struggles.

[Jamad · Rating 2 out of 5]

Borderline Fiction follows Marcus at two points in his life — nineteen and twenty-five — as he tries to navigate relationships, family history and a fragile sense of self. The novel moves back and forth between timelines to show how old wounds shape present behaviour, and how difficult it can be to step out of repeating patterns. Themes of mental health, instability, identity and the search for connection run through both strands, and Derek Owusu’s writing is often striking in its shifts of tone and style.

While I recognise the quality of the prose and the ambition of the book’s structure, it ultimately wasn’t for me. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped, and I found the nineteen-year-old Marcus particularly trying to spend time with. His volatility is well drawn, but it made sections of the novel hard to warm to.

All that said, the novel’s craft and thematic depth mean I wouldn’t be surprised to see it appear on next year’s Booker longlist.

2.5 rounded up rather than down because it was probably me and not the book.

[Cri · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that you admire more than you like — at least, that was the case for me. I thought the prose was excellent and the way the author switched between the two versions of the protagonist, separated by time, was impressive. For some reason, however, the novel did not resonate with me, despite my constant thoughts that it was really good. So, apparently, this is a very fine novel that I encountered at the wrong time. I might re-read it at a later date to see if I enjoy it more.