• 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.

  • Mine Boy (African Writers Series, AWS6)

    When Xuma move to Johannesburg he is a naive country boy, but the impact of harsh city life awakens him to the new ways and values of  radically different world. His vision of a ‘man without colour’, a raceless society, is shattered by the realities of his underprivileged existence.
    First published in 1946, this novel was one of the first books to expose universally the condition of black South Africans under a white regime. Abrahams’ forceful but restrained images of discrimination in the gold mines, the appalling housing and Xuma’s simple, humanitarian act of defiance, struck a chord around the world. Mine Boy has remained a central influence on South African fiction for over fifty years.
  • Fate’s Promise

    Sequel to the Lost Princess.

    They say that the path of true love never did run smoothly. Prince Gyakari and Princess Batoma’s relationship has entered a fiery phase where their love and loyalties are tested. As with true love, other combatants are always involved. Prince Darkwa of Mrem will try everything he has to separate these two lovers and he has a partner in Princess Afrakoma, who would stop at nothing to do the same. Can their love survive the wicked machinations of this deadly duo? Will another combatant from Gyakari’s own royal house, Prince Bonsu, who was willing to eliminate him, succeed in turning the tables on Gyakari in order to win Batoma’s love?

  • No Vengeance

    Age Range: 13+ years

    Colonel Barlow had cheated death many years back. He had been forced into exile by the man who had wanted him dead at the time of the uprising. He is back and must meet his adversary. He has returned with his son Kit, a battle tested soldier.

    Why does Sonday refuse to meet him face to face? Does he fear reprisal? And what is the cause of his nightmares? Meanwhile where is the blue diamond ring?

    No Vengeance

    40.00
  • Equiano’s Travels (African Writers Series, AWS10)

    Olaudah Equiano was born in 1745 in a village east of the Niger River in what is now Nigeria. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African was published in London in 1789. This is his own account of a remarkable life.

    At the age of ten he was captured by slave traders and taken to the southern states of America. He was sold to a planter in the West Indies and worked there and abroad slave ships sailing between the Caribbean and England. At the age of twenty-one he had saved enough money to buy his freedom. He visited the Mediterranean, took part in Phipps’ expedition to the Arctic in 1773 and crossed the Atlantic several times. He was an ardent member of the Movement for the Abolition of Slavery and was appointed Commissary for Stores when the freed slaves were settled in Sierra Leone.

    This abridged edition has a new introduction by Professor Ogude of the University of Benin, together with explanatory notes on the text.

  • Faceless

    Street life in the slums of Accra is realistically portrayed in this socially-commited, subtle novel about four educated women who are inspired by the plight of a 14-year old girl, Fofo. As the main characters convert their library center into a practical street initiative, the novel invokes the squalor, health risks, and vicious cycles of poverty and violence that drive children to the streets and women to prostitution; and, from which, ultimately, no one in the society is free.

    Faceless

    45.00
  • Houseboy (African Writers Series, AWS29)

    Toundi Ondoua, the rural African protagonist of Houseboy, encounters a world of prisms that cast beautiful but unobtainable glimmers, especially for a black youth in colonial Cameroon.
    Houseboy, written in the form of Toundi’s captivating diary and translated from the original French, discloses his awe of the white world and a web of unpredictable experiences. Early on, he escapes his father’s angry blows by seeking asylum with his benefactor, the local European priest who meets an untimely death. Toundi then becomes “the Chief European’s ‘boy’–the dog of the King.” Toundi’s attempt to fulfill a dream of advancement and improvement opens his eyes to troubling realities. Gradually, preconceptions of the Europeans come crashing down on him as he struggles with his identity, his place in society, and the changing culture.
  • The Enemy Within (African Writers Series)

    Set in South Africa in the early 1990s, against a backdrop of de Klerk’s rise to power, Steve Jacobs tells the story of Jeremy Spielman, a Jewish junior barrister, and his defense of a Xhosa man accused of murder.

    The murder trial, an Afrikaner girlfriend, and a mother who has tried to keep him from gentiles his whole life, all force Jeremy to confront his own love-hate relationship with the anti-apartheid struggle, South Africa’s almost unconscious racism, anti-Semitism, and his faith in an unjust legal system.

    Steve Jacobs trained as a lawyer but left his legal career to concentrate on writing. He is an active campaigner against cruelty to animals and has worked with squatters at Crossroads and in a local group opposing a nuclear power station.

  • Form 2D: Term 2 – Grandma Police

    Grandma Akpeko, Belinda’s paternal grandmother, arrived from Canada as expected. She was a very strict person. ‘A disciplinarian’, ‘A no-nonsense person’ and other titles were given to her by Belinda, her siblings and even her schoolmates! How did Belinda’s schoolmates get to know about Grandma Akpeko and nickname her ‘Grandma Police’?
    Find out in the fifth book in the Dyllis School Series.
  • 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.

  • The Deep Blue Between

    Twin sisters Hassana and Husseina’s home is in ruins after a brutal raid. But this is not the end but the beginning of their story, one that will take them to unfamiliar cities and cultures, where they will forge new families, ward off dangers and truly begin to know themselves.

    As the twins pursue separate paths in Brazil and the Gold Coast of West Africa, they remain connected through shared dreams of water. But will their fates ever draw them back together?

    A sweeping adventure with richly evocative historical settings, The Deep Blue Between is a moving story of the bonds that can endure even the most dramatic change.

  • A Time to Part

    Age Range: 13+ years

    The Ayi Kwei Armah Novel 1st Prize” Award Winner, GAW Awards 2018 
    She’s chasing shadows, running from the past. He’ll be there to catch her when she falls.
    Seven years ago, Jasmine left everything she knew behind. Her mother was dead, her father was terminally ill, and she had broken Hagan, the only man who ever loved her. It was the perfect time to start over. Except she never left any of it behind. When an echo from the past and the search for a killer pull her back into the chaos, she’ll have to decide if letting go is too high a price to pay for her life.
    This is a story of second chances, of love that survives the worst, and the fight to hold on to the light, in the face of darkness.

    A Time to Part

    30.00
  • The Hunt

    Sackey and Nyarko had always pitched their wits against each other. When Nyarko beat Sackey at a quiz competition, Sackey sought a way of proving that he was better than his rival. The opportunity came in a quest to find the emerald stool of the Krobos. The two rivals, with their friends, set out to the first to discover this ancient stool separately. Even more, unknowing to them, Sackey and Nyarko were related.

    The Hunt

    40.00
  • The Return of the Water Spirit (African Writers Series)

    Set in Angola in the late 1980s, a time of war, and when the Marxist-orientated ruling elite became engulfed by corruption, nepotism and rampant capitalism.

    Three centuries earlier, a hideous crime occurred, the beheading of a slave who had had inappropriate relations with his Master’s daughter. Now, in the very same Kinaxixi Square in the city of Luanda buildings are falling down one by one baffling the country’s engineers. Many describe this mysterious process as ‘Luanda Syndrome, God’s punishment on a degenerate society.

    Drawing on the essence of African mythology which had all but been obliterated by history, could this be explained by the return of a Water Spirit (the ‘kianda’)?

    The novel focuses on the interplay between these two forces-the forces of old and new. Just like faith can move mountains, the spirit of the water can move cities.

    This book is a scathing critique of Angola’s ruling elite, for abandoning their socialist principles in favour of rampant capitalism.

  • The God’s Daughter

    Jackie Vance and her daughter Ama visit Ghana at the invitation of Mae Brown, an anthropology professor on sabbatical at the University of Cape Coast Ghana. While touring the female slave quarters at Elmina Castle, the largest castle in Africa built by the Portuguese in 1482, Jackie, channelling an Ashanti princess who was captured during the British-Ashanti war, goes into a reverie about the horrifying experiences of the women who lived there several hundred years ago. Jackie was a proud and hot-tempered Ashanti princess called Nana Yaa who was captured during one of the British-Ashanti wars.

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