Elizabeth-Irene Baitie grew up in Ghana. As a child, she was a voracious reader and wanted to be a writer when she grew up.

Now a clinical biochemist and the director of a medical laboratory in Accra, she is a multiple award-winning writer of entertaining novels for and about children and young adults.  Each of her novels leads  page by page to the discovery of the hero hidden within her characters.

Elizabeth-Irene and her husband live in Accra with their three children.

Find out more about her books on www.elizabethirenebaitie.com 

Her books are listed below, for the specified age ranges:

Reader ages 8 – 12 years old

A Saint in Brown Sandals
An Angel in Mucky Shorts 

Reader ages 12 – 18 (Young Adult)

The Twelfth Heart 
The Dorm Challenge 
Rattling in the Closet
The Lion’s Whisper

  • Crossing the Stream

    Ato hasn’t visited his grandmother’s house since he was seven. He’s heard the rumours that she’s a witch, and his mother has told him he must never sit on the old couch on her porch. Now here he is, on that exact couch, with a strange-looking drink his grandmother has given him, wondering if the rumours are true. What’s more, there’s a freshly dug hole in her yard that Ato suspects may be a grave meant for him.

    Meanwhile at school, Ato and his friends have entered a competition to win entry to Nnoma, the island bird sanctuary that Ato’s father helped create. But something is poisoning the community garden where their project is housed, and Ato sets out to track down the culprit. In doing so, he brings his estranged mother and grandmother back together, and begins healing the wounds left on the family by his father’s death years before.

    And that hole in the yard? It is a grave, but not for the purpose Ato feared, and its use brings a tender, celebratory ending to this deeply felt and universal story of healing and love from one of Ghana’s most admired children’s book authors.

  • An Angel in Mucky Shorts

    Age Range: 8 and 11 years

    Auntie Lulu has a monster living in her house. It’s got a boxy head like a milk carton, hair that’s never combed, and eyes like a bullfrog. It wears mucky shorts and has dirty nails. It flicks dead flies at me and thinks it’s funny to let snot drip from its nose onto a table. Its name is Reggie and he’s Auntie Lulu’s son–which makes him my cousin. Yuck.

    Things are going from bad to worse in Rabi’s life. She told her classmates that her tree at home had the sweetest mangoes. And she promised to bring some to school to prove it. But every day someone steals the fruit from the tree! How will her mates ever believe her now? And who is this sneaky mango thief? Dreadful Auntie Sakwaa has come to live with them and is stinking up Rabi’s house with her green horse medicine. Her disgusting cousin comes to stay, and he turns her own little brother against her! Just as Rabi thinks her life couldn’t be more messed up, she meets an angel. And it wasn’t wearing a sparkling white robe.

  • A Saint in Brown Sandals

    Age Range: 8 and 11 years

    Eleven-year old Rabi thinks it would be wonderful to be like her classmate Maybelline – rich, pretty and popular with everyone in school. As her school’s big event on television draws closer, Rabi realises she has only one chance to be a star. Where she will shine best? Will it be if she follows in Maybelline’s dainty footsteps? Or will it be if she dares to run along as herself?

  • The Twelfth Heart

    When Mercy came to her new school near Accra, she knew exactly the sort of friends she wanted to make: certainly no-one who reminded her of the small town she had left behind – poor, ugly and dull. She did not realise that true friendship comes from the heart, and that the least likely of the twelve girls in her dormitory would come to mean the most to them all.

    Anyone who has been to a boarding school will identify with the characters in the story until its poignant end.

  • The Dorm Challenge

    Age Range: 9 years and above

    One bad friend and one desperate friend.

    Mercy could change their lives.

    The problem is she doesn’t know it.

    Mercy isn’t going to embarrass herself by speaking in a school competition just so her House can win the Dorm Cup.

    No way!

    There are better things she could do− like hanging out with her ultra-cool buddy Perry.

    But when she is thrust into the Dorm Challenge she discovers that the prize for speaking up is more precious than a trophy. And the prize for listening properly can mean more than anything in the world.

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