-
The Kaya-Girl
2012 First Place Burt Award for African Young Adult Literature Finalist
“I’m Abena,” I said in Twi.
“I’m Faiza,” she said in a language I would soon find out was called Dagbanli.”
An accidental meeting in Accra’s bustling Makola market makes an impact that is to affect the destinies of two extraordinary young women. For Abena, the open-minded girl from a comfortable family, the meeting is an opportunity to learn about the culture of the other girl and to appreciate the dignity that we often fail to see in the lives of the underprivileged of our country. For Faiza, the eponymous Kaya girl, the encounter with the richer girl is to provide a joyful adventure in her otherwise harsh existence and provided the inspiration that will transform her life.
The Kaya-Girl is a wonderful story, told with warm humor, about two young and confident people from vastly different Ghanaian worlds.
₵55.00The Kaya-Girl
₵55.00 -
Jungle Dance
Jungle Dance is a euphemism for a myriad of issues, roles, relationships and routes. It is a picture of what the corporate world is – challenging but rewarding also. It captures feelings of despondency, rejection and confusion interlaced with the triumphs, friendships and love that two women experience in their corporate journeys.
“Steeped in realism, yet fictional, emotional pet detached, almost biographical but not exactly that, a mishmash yet lucid – that’s what you get when you get an astute and observant corporate person doing a foray into fiction. You get real life drama in an imaginative narrative. Come let’s dance in this jungle of words.” – Nana Awere Damoah, Writer/Engineer
“Petra takes on an uncommon theme like the corporate world and tells a story from the lenses of her own experiences. This is a fictional work that ends up being real, motivational and romantic!” – Ama Pratt, Broadcast Journalist
“Riveting and gripping. A complete story about life in the corporate world and its vicissitudes — told with the sense of African love for family. A quintessential modern African story.” – Yaw Ofosu Larbi, Broadcast Journalist
₵55.00Jungle Dance
₵55.00 -
The Narrow Path (African Writers Series, AWS27)
The Narrow Path is a story set in southern Ghana. Kofi, the hero of this novel, follows the well-worn path of many young Africans caught between the traditional life and the new world after the end of colonial administration.
It is a story about discipline, mischief and the continuous struggle of the youth between adventure and discipline from his parents. The struggle defines the young protagonist and the interesting narration makes this novel a fine piece of literature.
₵60.00 -
Secrets of Scandals
It is not every day that one is transported into the social settings of 100 years ago. Add the intrigues of illicit affairs within inner family circles and one has in hand a historical high-society thriller that hooks the reader from page one. Set in the British colony of the Gold Coast, the novel drips with nostalgia and is richly flavoured with African customs of the Ga tradition.
In the world of this fast-paced book, patriarchs run the family like a corporate. At the heart of affairs is how the professions and indigenous businesses tapped into colonial connections. Secrets of Scandals is an expedition into the genesis of how the nation’s movers and shakers built their national fortunes and brokered their private shame.
₵60.00Secrets of Scandals
₵60.00 -
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.
₵60.00Crossing the Stream
₵60.00 -
Between Wars
In a single twist of war, two sister, Enkaakye and Timaa, find their lives turned upside down. Enkaakye resiliently waits for the return from war of the one she loves. Timaa chooses to give up hope and patience, and move on with her life. The sisters’ choices lead to consequences that threaten their bond of sisterhood to its core.
As war drums begin to beat in their community once more, will their relationship survive the imminent danger?
Between Wars is a heartwarming story of love, loss, family, and friendship. Above all, it shows how wisdom and courage can be found in the most unexpected of places.
₵65.00Between Wars
₵65.00 -
Babingo: The Nobel Rebel
In Pointe-Noire of the 1950’s lived Paul Makouta, a “civilized” and westernized native who was very proud of communicating exclusively in French with Madeleine Mamatouka, his wife, Alex his only son, and the other children of his household. Under no circumstance did Makouta allow the members of his family speak the language of Metropolitan France with the slightest trace of a Bantu accent. Again, anyone who dared speak Kituba, an indigenous language, with the family’s domestic staff was liable to severe reprimand.
Clearly, the father’s intransigence was at odds with the communicative practices in the neighborhood and of children commuting daily to school. And it was only natural for Tessa, a fellow pupil from the neighborhood, to successfully convince her teenage friend, Alex Babingo, of the absurdity of Makouta’s directive. Little did Alex Babingo realize that his initial acceptance of the irrationality of the father’s prohibition in colonized Congo was only the start of a trajectory which, from the other side of the world, would impel his return to the very roots of his culture and ancestral traditions in the now independent Republic of Congo or Congo-Brazzaville. Babingo, the Noble Rebel is a poignant and pulsating advocacy for the mainstreaming of indigenous languages into the curriculum of African countries, not least those belonging to the French-speaking world.
₵65.00Babingo: The Nobel Rebel
₵65.00 -
The Shrinking Bowl
Young girls in Ghana confront a challenging socio-economic environment. This novel is the story of one such girl’s life-journey, from childhood to middle-age, and the lessons of this journey. It is a sequel to the author’s first novel, Journey.
“A delightful lifeworld weighted with history and almost untouched in African fiction…a world whose veneer of simplicity belies its tangled dark underbelly. The novel deftly combines the solace of familiarity with a mystery of memory and intimacy…quirky and endearing.” – Professor Helen A. Yitah, Dean, School of Languages, University of Ghana (UG) and Honourary Secretary, Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences; former Head, Department of English, UG
“This book is a tour de force of its genre; a journey of discovery through a cultural landscape in a fascinating part of Ghana. Difficult to put down even at the end.” – Nana Kwasi Gyan Apenteng, Communications Consultant; former President, Ghana Association of Writers
₵70.00The Shrinking Bowl
₵70.00 -
Infinite Roots
“I must tell you my history,” Baba would roar, “the history you learn at school is not better than that which I have to tell you. My history concerns you directly, it is who you are, what you are, and what you’re going to become.”
“…woven in an unbroken thread of prose…in a complex, digressive narrative that is like a set of Chinese boxes (or those Russian Matryoshka dolls), one laid inside another.” — Literary Review
Infinite Roots follows the multi-generational story of a Ghanaian military family, composed through the eyes of a young daughter learning about her history and culture through the many stories of her parents and elders. This autobiographical novel spreads out across the 60s and 80s Ghana as the military family journeys from Wa to Tamale to Accra to Kumasi to Takoradi to Ho and more. As the young girl grows, she also begins to share her own re-tellings as her elders once did.
“…it is an incredible survey of Ghanaian traditions, customs, superstitions and beliefs, as well as social and political history and the emergence of female education.” — Lee Oliver
₵80.00₵100.00Infinite Roots
₵80.00₵100.00 -
Ashawo Diaries: Tales of Adwoa Attaa
A most intriguing intercourse of tragedy and sex
The titillating intrigues of a good bad girl…delightful reading: sometimes light, sometimes dark; always with ponderous insights! – Koku Dotse
Ashawo Diaries makes for engaging reading, and beyond connecting with earlier literary forebears, it is important to think about how such a novel enters the Ghanaian social landscape where sex is traditionally a public taboo. Ashawo Diaries is a text that challenges sanitized perspectives of Ghana. – Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang, Lecturer, Department of English, University of Ghana, Legon
[The author] is zealous towards unearthing the ills of society. I describe her as the “perfect role model of today’s world”. I am not surprised she took this bold step to write this story. Though bold for our traditional society, l am of the view that she held the bull by the horn. The story…will surely leave readers scratching their heads with excitement. – Dr (Mrs.) Nana Ama Pokuaa Arthur, Lecturer, KNUST
A thrilling page-turner. Amoafowaa is fluid in narration, and succinct in description. – Rebecca Obuobisa-Darko, Personnel Officer, Ga East Municipal Education Directorate
Cecila’s Ashawo Diaries is storytelling meddled in art, obviously, science and a game of the protagonist. Daring diary entries with erotic sprinkles, gripping and sustaining, which depicts the struggles of a native daughter in contrast to Richard Wright’s native son, the zigzag turns of life and the map of love, friendship, pleasure, identity, re-identity as compasses at each turn. Poetically written and with a feminist undertone. – Grace Ihejiamaizu, Lecturer, University of Calabar, Founder of IKapture and Opportunity Desk, Nigeria
Ashawo Diaries raises queries on why young girls should experience sexual suppression in a cultural context like Ghana where children are valued, moral standards are held high and sexual discussions silenced. – Dr. Georgina Yaa Oduro, Director, Centre for Gender Research, Advocacy and Documentation (CEGRAD), University of Cape Coast
₵90.00 -
At Nineteen: Bracing the Odds of Teenage Pregnancy
COMPELLING, REVEALING and HEART-WARMING, this is a memoir that will resonate with you forever.
When a young teenage mother sets out on a lonely path to care for herself and her unborn child in an unfavourable environment, she manages to continue her education after the birth of her child, despite the loss of her father, who was her most important support system.
She manages to give her child the best of everything with the support of family and a few close friends. But as fate would have it, the worst was yet to come.
Hers is a tale of suffering and survival.
A book that inspires strength and character through adversity and challenges in life.
₵100.00 -
Truth is a Flightless Bird
Obama comes to Kenya!
The American president’s historic visit to Nairobi is the electric backdrop to the story of a pastor, who plunges into the slums to rescue the woman he loves from the clutches of a Somali drug lord.
But how deep can the pastor go, without destroying his faith, and himself?
Truth is a Flightless Bird is a brutal love letter to the frontier town that is present-day Nairobi: a studied observation of the the failure of bare-knuckled capitalism, the inequality machines our cities have become, and – ultimately – the profoundly irrational human capacity to hope, to risk everything in order to have something in which to believe.
With Truth is a Flightless Bird, Hussain establishes a remarkable voice, one truly his own.
₵100.00Truth is a Flightless Bird
₵100.00 -
Saro
On a visit to the coast of Marina, Lagos, Siwoolu and his young family are lured by a traitor to a grand merchant ship where they are captured by slaveholders masquerading as traders. On the way to the new world, they are rescued by abolitionists on a British naval ship and sent to Freetown, a haven for freed slaves.
They settle in their new home, grow their family, and become successful merchants, trading goods between Freetown and Eko. Dotunu, Siwoolu’s wife, falls in love with another man and is caught in a love triangle. But their lives are upended again when they hear that the kingdom has selected the traitor as king. Siwoolu, content with his new life, yet fearful of a curse that lurks in the shadows, refuses to return, but Dotunu is determined to keep the traitor from the throne. She turns to their son, Oșolu, who is running from his own demons, to seize the throne that is rightfully theirs.
Saro is a multigenerational tale of betrayal and restitution, love and war, inspired by true events that will take the reader from the rocky terrain of Abeokuta and the burgeoning city of Lagos to the lion mountains of Freetown and Hastings of Sierra Leone from the 1830s to the 1850s.
₵110.00Saro
₵110.00 -
From Charleston to Accra (Hardcover)
Age Range: 3 – 8 years
From Charleston to Accra is a children’s book following the story of Leela as she moves with her family from their home in Charleston, South Carolina to Accra, Ghana. She juggles between excitement about the move and nervousness about leaving her familiar surroundings and friends. The family has a stop in Hamburg, Germany on their way to Accra and has a few adventures there. Eventually Leela is happy and excited to explore her new home with her family.
₵120.00 -
Taduno’s Song
The day a stained brown envelope arrives from Taduno’s homeland, he knows that the time has come to return from exile.
Arriving full of trepidation, the musician discovers that his community no longer recognises him, believing that Taduno is dead. His girlfriend Lela has disappeared, taken away by government agents. As he wanders through his house in search of clues, he realises that any traces of his old life have been erased. All that was left of his life and himself are memories. But Taduno finds a new purpose: to unravel the mystery of his lost life and to find his lost love. Through this search, he comes to face a difficult decision: to sing for love or to sing for his people.
Taduno’s Song is a moving tale of sacrifice, love and courage.
₵125.00Taduno’s Song
₵125.00