• A Country to Love and to Serve: Memoirs of a Ghanaian Diplomat

    This epic memoir chronicling the author’s diplomatic journey is a superb and enticing story, richly told. The narration provides great insights into the personal life and professional travails of a quintessential diplomat who rose from humble beginnings to be one of the eminent Ambassadors of the nation. Most fascinating is how adeptly the author combines the demands of motherhood and family with her tasks in the complex world of diplomacy.

    The memoir provides great insights, important lessons and best practices in diplomatic practice that should be invaluable for the nation’s policy makers and diplomats. The story told through A COUNTRY TO LOVE AND TO SERVE should be a real inspiration for young diplomats and a must read for any student of diplomacy.

  • A Cowrie of Hope (African Writers Series)

    “These were the nineties,” reflects the narrator of A Cowrie of Hope, and for the young widow Nasula they are years of relentless economic hardship and privation. She dreams of a better life for her beautiful daughter, Sula, free from poverty and independent of marriage. But when Nasula finds herself unable to pay for Sula’s education, her hopes seem to have been extinguished – until a friend advised her to go to Lusaka and sell her last sack of highly sought-after Mbala beans. Nasula makes the journey, but in the city she finds herself exposed to new, and predatory, dangers.

    In A Cowrie of Hope Binwell Sinyangwe captures the rhythms of a people whose poverty has not diminished their dignity, where hope can only be accompanied by small acts of courage, and where friendship has not lost its value.

  • A Dream Called September (Pacesetters)

    Thinking her dream can never come true, Tasmil reluctantly joins Wayne on his quest to find his ancestral roots. Intrigue deepens with each step they take.

  • A Grain of Wheat (African Writers Series, AWS36)

    Barack Obama, via Facebook: “A compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.”

    The Nobel Prize–nominated Kenyan writer’s best-known novel

    Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya’s independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village’s chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers’ tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested.

  • A Man of the People (African Writers Series, AWS31)

    As Minister for Culture, the Honourable M. A. Nanga is ‘a man of the people’, as cynical as he is charming, and a roguish opportunist. At first, the contrast between Nanga and Odili, a former pupil who is visiting the ministry, appears huge. But in the ‘eat-and-let-eat’ atmosphere, Odili’s idealism soon collides with his lusts – and the two men’s personal and political tauntings threaten to send their country into chaos. Published, prophetically, just days before Nigeria’s first attempted coup in 1966, A Man of the People is an essential part of his body of work dealing with modern African history.

  • A Play of Giants

    Described by the author as a ‘Fantasia on Aminian theme’, Wole Soyinka’s new play presents a savage portrait of a group of dictatorial African leaders at bay in an embassy in New York. The resemblance between them and recent historical characters is only too pronounced.

  • A Question of Power (African Writers Series, AWS149)

    “Your mother was insane. If you’re not careful you’ll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy who was a native.”

    It is never clear to Elizabeth whether the mission school principal’s cruel revelation of her origins is at the bottom of her mental breakdown. She has left South Africa with her son and is living in the village of Motabeng, the place of sand, in Botswana where there are no street lights at night. In the darkness of this country where people turn and look at her with vague curiosity as an outsider she establishes an entirely abnormal relationship with two men. A mind-bending book which takes the reader in and out of sanity.

  • 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?

  • A Sense of Savannah: Tales of a Friendly Walk through Northern Ghana

    Caution: For fear of emitting loud, embarrassing laughs, do not read this book in public.

    When Kofi Akpabli was posted to the northern border town of Paga to do his national service, he thought it was just going to be another ‘national suffering’. But when he encountered love at first sight with the landscape and the people, he was soon to realise that something close to destiny tied him to the place.

    The author was welcomed to a world refreshingly different from the back streets of Accra and Cape Coast. He discovered the smell of dawadawa, the taste of pito and the mystery of border towns. Over a period of seven years, Kofi criss-crossed the Upper East, Upper West and the Northern Regions.

    His real life adventures have been published in a cross-section of Ghanaian newspapers. By popular request, here comes A Sense of Savannah, a witty collection of travel tales that best express the character of Ghana’s savannah setting. While the entertaining narratives are guaranteed to interest a wide range of readers, what makes A Sense of Savannah worth reading is how the author generously dishes out well-researched facts and humour in equal measure.

    As story after story shows, Kofi is always on the road:

    – In Wa, he is ‘arrested’ and forced to drink beer without end on a Sunday morning

    – In Bolgatanga, his well-shirted body gets sprayed with goat urine from the top of a bus

    – In Tamale, during curfew hours and against the background of Wangara music, he spends the night on hard, cold asphalt

    – And on a busy market day in Navrongo, he is told, ‘you have no conscience!’

    Relax, grab a seat and let A Sense of Savannah drive you through the rather interesting northern half of Ghana.

     

  • A Squatter’s Tale (African Writers Series)

    Young financier Obi enjoys life in the fast lane in 1990’s Lagos. He walks tall in designer suits with his girlfriend at his side enjoying the envy of those with empty purses.

    When his finance company collapses Obi’s decadent lifestyle comes to an abrupt end and he is forced to flee to the United States. There he has to live on the margins of society. Obi wants money, he wants a woman, and he wants to live the good life.

    This face-paced novel, by turns comic and moving, reveals what success and failure mean for the young Nigerian at home and in exile. Ike Oguine explores the alienation experienced by today’s economic refugees under the cover of light-hearted comedy.

  • A Woman in Her Prime (African Writers Series, AWS40)

    A young woman makes that all-important rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood. However, her early adult life is marred by childlessness in a society that places a great premium on children and motherhood as the ultimate mark of womanhood.
  • Adventures of Cleopas (Peggy Oppong Novel)

    When Cleopas Onini was born, he had two front teeth and drank a big cup of porridge. At his naming ceremony, his uncle who had lived on top of a tree for 30 years climbed down to witness the occasion. As the family argued about the appropriate name for the baby, eight-day-old Cleopas sat up in his bed and clapped his tiny hands to show his preference for the name his uncle Ofutu announced. Everybody, including the catechist, took to their heels as they witnessed the strange scene. At three months, he could sit up, crawl and talk.

  • Agony in Her Voice (Pacesetters)

    In trying to protect his only daughter, Poline Kainda, from the treacherous world of men, Josephat Kinoti enlists the help of her apparently responsible old teacher, Julio Kinyua. Complications arise when Kinyua falls in love with the girl himself. Poline and her father seem unable to communicate with each other. He is incurably stubborn and she is resentful at his interference in her love for the young sweetheart, Mbatau.

  • Americanah: Tenth Anniversary Edition

    This special edition of the groundbreaking novel by internationally acclaimed author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie commemorates a decade of literary excellence and cultural impact, reaffirming Americanah’s place as a modern classic. Featuring a new introduction from the author, this edition is beautifully presented, designed to captivate both loyal fans and new readers alike.

    As teenagers in Lagos, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can. The self-assured Ifemelu departs for America. There she suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze had hoped to join her, but post 9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.

    Thirteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a blogger. But after so long apart and so many changes, will they find the courage to meet again, face to face? Fearless, gripping, spanning three continents and numerous lives, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Americanah is a richly told story of love and expectation set in today’s globalised world.

  • 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.

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