Staff Picks
#ReadAfricaWeek
- Sara M.
- Sunday, December 01, 2019
Collection
This first week of December, readers, publishers, and educators will celebrate Read Africa Week. Join in by reading books by African authors representing the diversity and breadth of African literature!
Taduno's Song
A Novel
Published in 2017
"A stunning debut from a fresh Nigerian literary voice: a mesmerizing, deceptively simple, Kafkaesque narrative, resonant of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and lightly informed by the life of Nigerian musical superstar Fela Kuti--a powerful story of love, sacrifice, and courage. The day a stained brown envelope reaches Taduno from his homeland, he knows that the time has come to return from exile. Arriving full of hope, the musician discovers that his people no longer recognize him and no one recalls his voice. His girlfriend, Lela, has disappeared, abducted by government agents. He wanders through his house in search of clues but all traces of his old life have been erased. As he becomes aware that all that is left of himself is an emptiness, Taduno finds new purpose: to unravel the mystery of his lost life and find his lost love. But soon he must face a difficult decision: to fight the power or save his woman, to sing for love or for his people"-- Provided by publisher.
A Bit of Difference
Published in 2012
A new novel from the winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African LiteratureAt thirty-nine, Deola Bello, a Nigerian expatriate in London, is dissatisfied with being single and working overseas. Deola works as a financial reviewer for an international charity, and when her job takes her back to Nigeria in time for her father's five-year memorial service, she finds herself turning her scrutiny inward. In Nigeria, Deola encounters changes in her family and in the urban landscape of her home, and new acquaintances who offer unexpected possibilities. Deola's journey is as much about evading others' expectations to get to the heart of her frustration as it is about exposing the differences between foreign images of Africa and the realities of contemporary Nigerian life. Deola's urgent, incisive voice captivates and guides us through the intricate layers and vivid scenes of a life lived across continents. With Sefi Atta's characteristic boldness and vision, A Bit of Difference limns the complexities of our contemporary world. This is a novel not to be missed.
Homegoing
A Novel
Published in 2016
"Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle's women's dungeon, and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, where she will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the tribal wars of Ghana to slavery and Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the north to the Great Migration to the streets of 20th century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi's has written a modern masterpiece, a novel that moves through histories and geographies and--with outstanding economy and force--captures the troubled spirit of our own nation"-- Provided by publisher.
Season of Crimson Blossoms
Published in 2016
"Season of Crimson Blossoms tells the captivating story of an illicit affair between a twenty-five-year-old street gang leader, Hassan Reza, and a devout fifty-five-year-old widow and grandmother, Binta Zubairu, who yearns for intimacy after the sexual repression of her marriage and the pain of losing her first son. This story of love and longing--set in a conservative Muslim community in Nigeria--reveals deep emotions that defy age, class, and religion. This novel gives a unique perspective on life and relationships in Northern Nigeria, a region vastly under-represented in the body of world literature."--provided by Amazon.com.
Born on a Tuesday
A Novel
Published in 2015
In the far reaches of northwestern Nigeria, Dantala lives among a gang of street boys that are paid by the Small Party to cause trouble during the election. When their attempt to burn down the opposition's headquarters ends in disaster, Dantala must run for his life, leaving his best friend behind. He ends up at a mosque in a motor park where he soon becomes a favored apprentice to the mosque's Sheikh. He is assigned a roommate name Jibril, and a friendship develops as the boys trade language skills -- Dantala's Arabic for Jibril's English. But when one of the Sheikh's closest advisors begins to raise his own radical movement, Dantala finds himself faced with a terrible conflict of loyalties. As bloodshed erupts in the city around him, he must decide what kind of Muslim -- and what kind of man -- he wants to be.
Dance of the Jakaranda
Published in 2017
Set in the shadow of Kenya&#x;s independence from Great Britain, this story reimagines the special circumstances that brought black, brown, and white men together to lay the railroad that heralded the birth of the nation.-- Provided by publisher.
Black Moses
Published in 2017
It's not easy being Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. There's that long name of his for a start, which means, "Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors." Most people just call him Moses. Then there's the orphanage where he lives, run by a malicious political stooge, Dieudonn ̌Ngoulmoumako, and where he's terrorized by two fellow orphans, the twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala. But after Moses exacts revenge on the twins by lacing their food with hot pepper, the twins take Moses under their wing, escape the orphanage, and move to the bustling port town of Pointe-Noire, where they form a gang that survives on petty theft. What follows is a funny, moving, larger-than-life tale that chronicles Moses's ultimately tragic journey through the Pointe-Noire underworld and the politically repressive world of Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970's and 80's. Mabanckou's vivid portrayal of Moses's mental collapse echoes the work of Hugo, Dickens, and Brian DePalma's Scarface, confirming Mabanckou's status as one of our great storytellers. Black Moses is a vital new extension of his cycle of Pointe-Noire novels that stand out as one of the grandest, funniest, fictional projects of our time.
Palace Walk
Published in 2011
Introduces us to Sayyid's gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and his three sons -- the tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute hedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal. The family's trials mirror those of their country during the years spanning the two world wars, as change comes to a society that has resisted it for centuries.
Kintu
Published in 2017
'First published in Kenya in 2014 to critical and popular acclaim, Kintu is a modern classic, a multilayered narrative that reimagines the history of Uganda through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan. Divided into six sections, the novel begins in 1750, when Kintu Kidda sets out for the capital to pledge allegiance to the new leader of the Buganda Kingdom. Along the way, he unleashes a curse that will plague his family for generations. In an ambitious tale of a clan and a nation, Makumbi weaves together the stories of Kintu's descendants as they seek to break from the burden of their shared past and reconcile the inheritance of tradition and the modern world that is their future."--Back cover.
Tram 83
Published in 2015
Exceptional debut Congolese novel uses jazz rhythm to evoke the frenzied exploitation of land and people in contemporary Africa.
Ladivine
Published in 2016
After a woman, Clarisse, is murdered on a trip to visit her mother in Bordeaux, her daughter tries to uncover what happened to her with the help of a brown dog who appears to have taken in the spirit of the deceased.
The Reactive
A Novel
Published in 2016
The story of Lindanathi, a young HIV+ man grappling with the death of his brother, for which he feels unduly responsible. He and his friends—Cecelia and Ruan—work low-paying jobs and sell anti-retroviral drugs (during the period in South Africa before ARVs became broadly distributed). In between, they huff glue, drift through parties, and traverse the streets of Cape Town where they observe the grave material disparities of their country. -- amazon.com
What is Not Yours is Not Yours
Stories
Published in 2016
The stories collected in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours are linked by more than the exquisitely winding prose of their creator: Helen Oyeyemi's ensemble cast of characters slip from the pages of their own stories only to surface in another. The reader is invited into a world of lost libraries and locked gardens, of marshlands where the drowned dead live and a city where all the clocks have stopped; students hone their skills at puppet school, the Homely Wench Society commits a guerrilla book-swap, and lovers exchange books and roses on St Jordi's Day. It is a collection of towering imagination, marked by baroque beauty and a deep sensuousness.
Harvest of Skulls
Published in 2017
In 1994, the akazu, Rwandan's political elite, planned the genocidal mass slaughter of 500,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi and Hutu who lived in the country. Given the failure of the international community to acknowledge the genocide, in 1998, ten African authors visited Rwanda in a writing initiative that was an attempt to make partial amends. In this multidimensional novel, Abdourahman A. Waberi claims, "Language remains inadequate in accounting for the world and all its turpitudes, words can never be more than unstable crutches, staggering along... And yet, if we want to hold on to a glimmer of hope in the world, the only miraculous weapons we have at our disposal are these same clumsy supports." Shaped by the author's own experiences in Rwanda and by the stories shared by survivors, Harvest of Skulls stands twenty years after the genocide as an indisputable resource for discussions on testimony and witnessing, the complex relationship between victims and perpetrators, the power of the moral imagination, and how survivors can rebuild a society haunted by the ghost of its history.