Minaret
Minaret tells the story of a Sudanese family’s fate: of loss, of migration, of drastic social decline, and of the support that religion can provide.
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The first woman
The first woman opens up enriching perspectives on being a woman and friendships between women. For me it was a real reading pleasure: The book is definitely one of my Top 10 of the year 2020!
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Lagoon
Aliens have landed off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria. Immediately, they change pollution levels, marine life, the quality of the ocean water – and that’s just before they get to land. Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon is both a fun, high-action romp through the old sci-fi tropes of alien arrival, and in many ways a carefully considered decolonisation of the genre and its Eurocentric epistemological underpinnings.
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The Boundary
They should adapt this book into a movie. It’s a dark, gritty crime noir waiting to be made. What makes it more than your average whodunit murder-mystery genre-novel is the context of its setting.
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Dangerous Love
Set in Lagos, Nigeria, during the 1970s, Dangerous Love follows the story of Omovo, a young man who finds himself trapped in a life that is anything but easy: his mother is dead and his brothers escaped a home controlled by a recently remarried, violent and disillusioned father.
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Afterlives
With an awareness for the gendered dimensions of human experiences, Afterlives conveys how people in German East Africa maintain their dignity and remain steadfast.
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Die Sommer
“Die Sommer” (“The Summers”) is an important book about the world’s dividedness, about religious and political conflicts, about prejudice and identity.
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Im Bauch der Königin
In an undefined neighbourhood of an undefined German town live a boy and a girl. They grow up, experience first love affairs, first disappointments. So far, so conventional – but Karosh Taha’s novel Im Bauch der Königin (“In the Belly of the Queen”) is not primarily a heterosexual coming-of-age story.
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Freshwater
What makes Freshwater exceptional and so valuable as a literary intervention is the way it turns Western epistemologies of mental health on their head.
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Girl, Woman, Other
Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other tells the stories of twelve people – as the dust jacket puts it – ‘mostly women, mostly Black’ for whom Britain has, in one way or another, been a home.
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