5 books set in Nigeria it’s worth checking out
A listicle of five books set in Nigeria it’s worth checking out – from classics to less well-known newcomers, there’s some great reading here.
more...Tags:
The Namesake
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut novel tells the story of the Ganguli family: Ashoke and Ashima, originally from Bengal, migrate to the North-eastern United States in the 1960s. They have two children there, and the novel follows the experiences of their firstborn son. It’s a novel about living in between places, cultures and assigned identities.
more...
The Nickel Boys
In a grazing pasture on the North side of what was once the campus of the Nickel Academy for Boys, an archaeology student from the University of Florida stumbles across a field of bones: unmarked graves. She and her cohort are there to excavate the official graveyard of the school before the lands are developed into an office park. The small bones in the known cemetery are already suspiciously often fractured, suggesting breaks and injuries before death: what history of abuses does the field of unmarked bones testify to? Thus begins Colson Whitehead’s prizewinning novel The Nickel Boys.
more...
A Burning
Megha Majumdar’s debut novel, A Burning, is a highly political – and at times disturbing – story about the desire for a life worth living, about power and corruption.
more...
Adas Raum
Adas Raum is ambitious and epic in scope, gripping and intelligent in execution, and somehow both unforgiving and funny. It will let you meet Ada in her different iterations through the ages, as well as God in a number of irreverent and charismatic guises
more...
Transcendent Kingdom
Addiction and family, religion and science, being Ghanaian in Alabama: these are some of the issues that Yaa Gyasi’a second novel Transcendent Kingdom confronts. Written from the perspective of Gifty, now a talented biomedical researcher at a prestigious US university, this is the story of the loss of a charismatic brother to opioid addiction, and the complex aftermath of this trauma for those he leaves behind.
more...
The Joys of Motherhood
One of the most renowned novels by Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood (1979) is set during the first half of the twentieth century in Nigeria and tells the life story of Nnu Ego.
more...
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.
more...
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!
more...
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.
more...