Joma West Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Joma West loves to refer to herself as a third culture writer who writes some very popular works that straddle science fiction and fantasy.

She was born in London to a Kenyan Indian mother and a British father. A month after she was born, the family moved to Zambia and over the years she has lived in diverse places from Japan, Africa, Italy, Scotland, and China.

As such, given that she spent much of her childhood bouncing between countries her work has a certain Asian and African flavor.

Because of her upbringing and nomad lifestyle, she does not have an answer when someone asks where she grew up or what is her hometown. For Joma, home has always been anywhere her parents moved the family to.

Still, she has made a reputation for writing about fictional places that you can easily connect with from an emotional level. At some point, she went to the University of Glasgow, from where she graduated with a degree in English Literature and Language.

She would then become a teacher for a while not because she liked it but because it was what grownups were supposed to do.

She made her fiction writing debut with the publishing of the MMU novella award-winning work “Wild” which she published in 2016.

She published “Face” as her debut novel in 2022 but also has published many short stories in a range of anthologies over the years.

Joma currently makes her home in Glasgow Scotland.

Like many of her contemporaries, Joma West started writing stories when she was just a kid. She used to write without thinking about it until she turned fifteen, which is when she began writing novels.

As would be expected, it was a terrible piece of work. At the time, she never knew of fan fiction or any such thing but believes what she wrote was her own form of that.

She did not participate in any communities online or offline and used to do all her writing by hand. She started out writing several chapters that she would share with her friends.

Since Joma was attending boarding school, she used to have her friends gather around her in the evenings to listen to what she had written that day. It used to be a lot of fun since most of the characters were based on her friends.

When she was in university, she began working on a new novel but found it difficult to get her head around it. But then she began collaborating with a friend who was doing very well with short stories.

When she sent the friend her story she got some encouraging feedback and she got the confidence that she needed. She would then get more into short story writing and it was from this that she penned her novel.

Joma West’s novel thus started out as a short story after she chatted with some friends who complained about how the media was emphasizing sex to an absurd degree.

Seeing sex and bodies all over the place had somehow been turning them off of intimacy. West could relate to that as she saw it as an interesting idea.

She started thinking about what would the world look like if people did not touch each other. Would we still be able to have children?

She began writing her novel a long time ago as she found inspiration from the likes of Ursula Le Guin.

The latter’s novel “Left Hand of Darkness” was a very big influence on the author. She still remembers how she read either an interview or essay with Le Guin talking about the time she was writing her novel Left Hand.

At that time she needed to do an exploration of what could happen if gender was removed from humanity. Just what would be left over?

As such, Ursula Le Guin’s work has provided a lot of inspiration because she explores and asks a lot of questions that may have no answers. This is the same approach she took when writing her debut novel “Face.”

“Face” by Joma West introduces Tonia, a woman whose face value has plateaued. Given her declining looks, she is looking to have a baby which she believes will enhance her image.

Having a baby is a good move, especially during times when children of the wealthy are treated more like objects of status than anything else.

She could also take advantage of designer babies as many couples are now selecting babies on the basis of aesthetics as all tradition and culture seem to have gone out of the window.

Many of the in-demand babies are designed and bred by surrogate mothers most of who are very poor. The mothers seeking surrogate babies usually deem childbearing as very vulgar and lowly.

Tonia is not very comfortable with the complexities of surrogate motherhood but she cannot express her reservations given that image is everything.

Still, she does break down from time to time when she is not in public as she fractures into despair and panic she cannot explain.

In this society, vulnerability is looked down upon and even one character goes on a horrible downward spiral. She completely broke down when she realized that her father had desires beyond the advancement s and maintenance of his image.

Joma West’s novella “Wild” asserts that everything good is usually referred to as wild. Most people use this word to refer to anything that has a particular value. For many people, wild is what you want to have, how you want to look, and what you want to be.
The work is set in a dangerous world in which everything is civilized but walls keep nature out and people make their homes in domed cities.

But the citizens of this world can experience a different kind of world by stepping into a simulation to experience being anywhere and anything. All the wild kids take to the world of simulation as they seek to experience the wild world despite the danger.
People who are wild fit in and get to be part of something and this is the biggest draw for the wild and those seeking to be wild. But things are never that simple even in a simulated world.