• Same Elephants

    Marjy Marj’s anticipated follow-up to The Shimmigrant is an enlightening, introspective, heartwarming novel about four friends from diverse backgrounds. Sasha Badu is an immigrant in search of a better life. After meeting Rakiya Muhammad, Jane Taylor and Aviva Schwartz at a political event, the four become fast friends. When Sasha and Rakiya are mistaken for trespassers, the friends embark on a quest to educate their community about the dangers of stereotyping.

    Same Elephants explores everyday relationships, the presumptuous nature of society and the ability to rise above prejudice.

    Same Elephants

    70.0085.00
  • 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
  • The Shimmigrant

    A poignant yet optimistic story about the plight of a young immigrant. The Shimmigrant is a compelling story of a young girl’s will to survive against all odds.

    The Shimmigrant

    65.00
  • The Matriarch’s Verse

    I am a mongrel; a mixed breed of Ga, Ewe, Akuapem, English, Middle-Eastern and American cultures; I am a Third Culture Kid.

    Apiorkor’s socio-cultural experiences are interesting and might appear to be unique. But the truth is that there are several other Ghanaians who are secret sharers of her life. Such people lack access to platforms that would allow them to tell their collective story, so that their societies and communities can re-think all of the things that affect them.

    Happily, Apiorkor is an artist over matter and over emotions. She possesses a mastery over words and over the essences of life. Many Ghanaian men, women and children are like her.

    And her voice represents their voices.

    In this sensational collection, The Matriarch seeks to celebrate, shock, tickle, challenge and highlight our Ghanaian-ness in the 21st Century. The author peppers our imagination with the following:

    What does it mean to be Ghanaian?

    How have we progressed?

    Why do we stand for the things we stand for?

    Who really is the modern Ghanaian woman?

    Where is the global place for the urban Ghanaian space?

  • 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.

  • 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
  • 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
  • Victims of Circumstance

    This is the story of an adventure, power, love and a desire for wealth.

    The story of a young village man in pursuit of happiness in a city uncertain in character.

    Asante had a very promising life as a city dweller selling essential items in small kiosks by the way side. When he decides it is time to marry, he abandons the trade in search of a ‘better life’.

    The story unfolds and the events that follow reveal the challenges of city life and travelling.

  • Shadow of Wealth

    This is a story of corruption, cheating, and power, maladministration and nepotism in high places; the story of a Managing Director of a public corporation who, in search of a young woman to entertain him, upsets the whole administration and turns discipline in the public corporation to satisfy her.

    It was first a show of wealth-spending from public funds. It led from over strained expectations via disappointed hopes then missed its destination leading to the hard realization that the young woman for whom he sacrificed his work did not love him.

    All the experiences are new and in the midst of corruption, maladministration, and cheating, she fights to get out of them and away from the woman who seeks to ruin her future-rare narrative power and authentic detail.

  • A Husband for Esi Ellua

    Dramatic and Haunting…this is the story of the consuming bravery of a man over whose love for a woman falls the shadow of imminent disaster.

    It is set in the Second World War in shattered Gold Coast (now Ghana) where husbands torn from their wives and children found themselves in places undreamt of only a few months before. Amid the gaiety and clatter of Army life, the man and woman play out dramas with perilous intensity to the final moment of disaster.

    Filled with brilliance and fascination.

  • 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
  • The Wizard of Asamang

    In The Wizard of Asamang, Asare Konadu presents a lasting picture of Ghanian society in the rural area welded together by love, humored innocence and gaiety. The strange events and places in the hero’s young mind are recorded realistically combining inventive imagination with technical sills.
  • 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.
  • Ordained by the Oracle (African Writers Series, AWS55)

    Boateng, a prosperous trader in Elmina, has the beginnings of disbelief in the old customs. His wife dies suddenly and he is put through forty days and forty nights of rituals. The conflicting strains of emotion on social behavior are vividly shown by this practised writer.
  • The ‘Coup’ Makers

    Engaging, moving, and very effective, this is the diary of a thirty seven year old widow whose record of the coups through thirty years of independence remains as fresh and immediate as when the author first experienced them. Usually frank, it represents a vivid and convincing picture of the day to day suffering of the people in coups and recaptures the grim atmosphere of the hard and bitter struggle.

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