• The Death of Vivek Oji

    Named one of the year’s most anticipated books by The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, BuzzFeed, and more

    They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.

    One afternoon, a mother opens her front door to find the length of her son’s body stretched out on the veranda, swaddled in akwete material, his head on her welcome mat. The Death of Vivek Oji transports us to the day of Vivek’s birth, the day his grandmother Ahunna died. It is the story of an overprotective mother and a distant father, and the heart-wrenching tale of one family’s struggle to understand their child, just as Vivek learns to recognize himself.

    Teeming with unforgettable characters whose lives have been shaped by Vivek’s gentle and enigmatic spirit, it shares with us a Nigerian childhood that challenges expectations. This novel, and its celebration of the innocence and optimism of youth will touch all those who embrace it.

  • The Waiting

    A largely allegorical exploration of the loneliness of an existence based on an alien world-view, Martin Egblewogbe’s The Waiting is a collection rooted in metropolitan Ghana, but its primary territory is the human mind. Juxtaposing his training as a physicist against his curiosity about local myth, he creates a universe that’s both entertaining and erudite. In A Photograph of K & S, Smiling, a completely self-obsessed man, returned home after his father’s death, attempts to explain away his unremarkable life based on one perceived slight from his youth; in The Gonjon Pin (title story for the 2014 Caine Prize anthology) a genius working on a program to predict lottery numbers is stumped by the appearance of an intruder’s disembodied genitals on the wall of his computer engine room; The Making, Rain and Back to the Halls explore futility in different ways, while Atta explores life after death – a theme that reoccurs in a much bleaker guise in The Crwoling Caterpillar. Often Kafkaesque in its isolation of characters and a pervading sense of powerlessness, The Waiting nevertheless maintains a constant hum of humour, nowhere more so than in The Going Down of Pastor Mintumi – in which a pastor who has discovered the pleasures of the flesh late in life overindulges with hilarious consequences. The title story, The Waiting, is judgement day in a twisted mind, filled with the kinds of questions that haunt a life on earth, which, ultimately, is the quest of all art.

    The Waiting

    125.00
  • 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.

    Taduno’s Song

    125.00
  • Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

    In three critically acclaimed novels, Akwaeke Emezi has introduced readers to a landscape marked by familial tensions, Igbo belief systems, and a boundless search for what it means to be free. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, the bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji reveals the harrowing yet resolute truths of their own life. Through candid, intimate correspondence with friends, lovers, and family, Emezi traces the unfolding of a self and the unforgettable journey of a creative spirit stepping into power in the human world. Their story weaves through transformative decisions about their gender and body, their precipitous path to success as a writer, and the turmoil of relationships on an emotional, romantic, and spiritual plane, culminating in a book that is as tender as it is brutal.

    Electrifying and inspiring, animated by the same voracious intelligence that distinguishes their fiction, Dear Senthuran is a revelatory account of storytelling, self, and survival.

  • Daughter in Exile: A Novel

    The acclaimed author of The Teller of Secrets returns with a gut-wrenching, yet heartwarming, story about a young Ghanaian woman’s struggle to make a life in the US, and the challenges she must overcome.

    Lola is twenty-one, and her life in Senegal couldn’t be better. An aspiring writer and university graduate, she has a great job, a nice apartment, a vibrant social life, and a future filled with possibility. But fate disrupts her world when she falls for Armand, an American Marine stationed at the U.S. Embassy. Her mother, a high court judge in Ghana, disapproves of her choice, but nothing will stop Lola from boarding a plane for Armand and America.

    That fateful flight is only the beginning of an extraordinary journey; she has traded her carefree existence in Senegal for the perilous position of an undocumented immigrant in 1990s America.

    Lola encounters adversity that would crush a less-determined woman. Her fate hangs on whether or not she’ll grow in courage to forge a different life from one she’d imagined, whether she’ll succeed in putting herself and family together again. Daughter in Exile is a hope-filled story about mother love, resilience, and unyielding strength.

  • The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives

    For a polygamist like Baba Segi, his collection of wives and a gaggle of children are the symbol of prosperity, success and validation of his manhood. Everything runs reasonably smoothly in the patriarchal home, until wife number four intrudes on this family romance. Bolanle, a graduate amongst the semi-literate wives, is hated from the start. Baba Segi’s glee at bagging a graduate doesn’t help matters. Worse, Bolanle’s arrival threatens to do more than simply ruffle feathers. She’s unwittingly set to expose a secret that her co-wives intend to protect, at all costs.

    Lola Shoneyin’s light and ironic touch exposes not only the rotten innards of Baba Segi’s polygamous household in this cleverly plotted story; it also shows how women not educated or semi-literate, women in contemporary Nigeria can be as restricted, controlled and damaged by men – be they fathers, husbands, uncles, rapists – as they’ve never been.

  • Freshwater

    An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born “with one foot on the other side.” Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities.

    Ada has always been unusual. As an infant in southern Nigeria, she is a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents successfully prayed her into existence, but she becomes a troubled child, prone to violent fits of anger and grief, developing separate selves within her. Ada is more than just volatile – she is an ogbanje, born “with one foot on the other side.” When Ada travels to America for college, a traumatic event crystallizes her selves into something more powerful.

    Based in the author’s realities and narrated by these selves, Freshwater maps how Ada’s life spirals in a dangerous direction as her alters – now protective, now hedonistic – move into control.

    Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace, heralding the arrival of a fierce new literary voice.

    Freshwater

    115.00
  • The Hidden Star

    Nolitye lives in a shack with her mother Thembi in Phola, a dusty township on the edge of Johannesburg. She is good at maths and likes collecting stones, which she places in a bucket under her bed. She also has unusual powers: she can communicate with dogs. Nolitye has two close friends, Bheki, who is overweight, and the bespectacled Four Eyes, who join with her to resist the bullying from Rotten Nellie and her gang of Spoilers.

    One day, Nolitye finds a special stone that has the power to make people feel happy and laugh. Her mission from now on is to gather together the other pieces of the stone and reunite them, to stop darkness from taking control of her world.

    The Hidden Star

    115.00
  • Five Brown Envelopes

    Nduka “Kaka” Kabiri’s company is in trouble. A legacy inherited from his late father, Construction Lions Limited will be liquidated after their multi-billion-dollar project in Northeastern Nigeria is seized and destroyed by terrorists.

    To save his company, Kaka’s bid must win a World-Bank- sponsored rail project tender. This contract will pay off all his debt and make Kaka one of the richest men in Africa. The stakes are high, and greedy, powerful, dangerous men in the corridors of power—and some close enough to walk the corridors of his own home—will do anything to stop Kaka from winning the rail tender.

    Things become dangerous for him when a beautiful seductress, Tsemaye, appears. She is followed in sequence by five brown envelopes whose mysterious contents threaten to destroy his young family, ensuring that he may lose more than just the rail tender.

    Five Brown Envelopes is a gripping thriller in the tradition of Jeffrey Archer and Richard North Patterson.

  • Even When Your Voice Shakes

    Age Range: 12 years and above

    A young girl speaks out against her wealthy abuser in this riveting YA novel from one of Ghana’s most celebrated children’s book authors.

    When Amerley is offered a job working for one of her mother’s distant relatives, she knows he has to accept. Her wages will feed her family, help her sisters stay in school, and ensure that her mother won’t have to worry about them. Amerley’s move to Accra isn’t easy, but she soon settles into her new life away from her small town- until an unfortunate incident.

    Through the life of an ordinary girl, Even When Your Voice Shakes exposes the damage wrought by institutionalized misogyny and poverty and reveals how even those who are most disadvantaged are never without their own power.

  • The Lady in Boots: Memoirs of Ghana’s First Female Major General

    Available from 11th September, 2023
    The book is Major General Constance Edjeani-Afenu’s remarkable memoir. It chronicles her 43-year extraordinary journey in the Ghana Armed Forces.
    She was the first female Commanding Officer, and the first female Major General. Her story is a testimony to dedication, leadership, and resilience.

  • The Daughters of Nandi

    As she took her dying breath, Nandi Mhlongo, mother of Shaka kaSenzangakhona, cursed the house of Zulu and her family, the Mhlongos, for the disrespect she endured at their hands. In the ancestral realm, Nandi worries that her malediction may have been rash and too dangerous for the descendants of the two houses. The curse can be undone but it will need a human medium to convey the message to the progeny.

    Through three historical periods, three women who are extraordinary in their different ways will seek to get restitution for Nani. Gentle Keeya, a Motswana woman of the House of Moagi who marries one of Nandi’s descendants as the English, the Boers and the Zulu go to the war in the 19th century; Uju, a spirited married woman who carves a space for herself in history during the forced removals of Sophiatown in the 20th century; and in the 21st century Amangwe, who reluctantly joins her fellow students as they speak up against a meaningless freedom during the #FeesMustFall protests.

    Will any of these three women manage to ensure Nandi Mhlongo is appeased and if not, what shall be the consequences to the Houses of Mhlongo and Zulu and to the three Daughters of Nandi themselves?

    An engaging debut which seamlessly weaves fact, fiction and spiritualities while subverting the way the reader perceives history.

  • The Whispering Trees

    The magical tales in The Whispering Trees capture the essence of life, death and coincidence in Northern Nigeria. Myth and reality intertwine in stories featuring cat-eyed English witches, political agitators, newly-wedded widows, and the tormented whirlwind, Kyakkyawa. The two medicine men of Mazade battle against their egos, an epidemic and an enigmatic witch. And who is Okhiwo, whose arrival is heralded by a pair of little white butterflies?

  • Pet

    Age Range: 12 years and above

    There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with this lesson all their life. But when Jam meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colors and claws, who emerges from one of her mother’s paintings and a drop of Jam’s blood, she must reconsider what she’s been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster—and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption’s house. Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also uncover the truth, and the answer to the question—How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?

    Pet

    95.00
  • The Chameleon Girl

    University lecturer, Soumaya Dramé, abandons her job in England to go after her mother, Pearl, who, in the wake of a quarrel with her Senegalese father, AI, has fled to Senegal. Determined to track Pearl down before her despondent father does something foolish, Soumaya enlists the help of a charismatic photographer, Aziz. As they navigate a place she is from but not quite a part of, Soumaya meets her Senegalese relatives – and also runs into a beautiful older woman who seems to be stalking her.

    Set mostly in sunny Dakar, The Chameleon Girl is the story of a woman of dual identities confronting her parents’ past amid secrets, stereotypes and cross-cultural family tensions.

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