• Pleasantview

    Winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean LiteratureWinner of the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction. Shortlisted for the Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize 2022

    Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these and other sunny images are all they know about life in the Caribbean. However, if you want to learn how the locals truly live and experience the dark and often harrowing truths that lurk behind the idyllic imagery of Caribbean culture, then come visit the town of Pleasantview.

    Come during election season, and see how one candidate sets out to slaughter endangered turtles- just for fun. Or come on the day the other candidate beats his outside woman,’ so badly she ends up losing their baby. Then come on the night of the political rally, where this grieving woman exacts very public revenge. Stay a while, and see how this single event has a trajectory far beyond the lives of the immediate actors, with often tragic and heartbreaking consequences.

    Written in a remarkable combination of Standard English and Trinidad Creole. Pleasantview showcases the entrenched political, racial, patriarchal, and class dichotomies of life in Trinidad.

    Pleasantview

    150.00
  • No Be From Hia

    A homecoming tale of a family brought together by migration and torn apart by tragedy and secrets. In a search for identity, love and acceptance – two ordinary girls travel from London to Lusaka to Lagos in order to save their family and discover their destiny.

    Meet the Ayomides and the Kombes – Zambian-Nigerian-Jamaican powerhouse families brought together during the post-colonial migration of the 1960’s to the UK – and later separated by death, divorce and betrayal. Scattered between London, Lusaka, and Lagos, only the new generation can save this family.

    Maggie Ayomide and Bupe Kombe are cousins on either side of the world who couldn’t be more different. Zambian-Nigerian and Zambian-Jamaican, both yearn for their disbanded family to reunite. When Bupe leaves Brixton to go to secondary school in Zambia, she brings light and disorder to Maggie’s world. However, the girls are hindered by dark family secrets such as the mysterious death of their late grandmother, and Maggie’s missing Nigerian father.

    From the blazing streets of Brixton riots to multi-party elections in Zambia to glitzy Independence Day celebration and adventurous nightclubs in Lagos, this heartwarming story breathes life into the modern-day result of postcolonial Africa and 20th Century migration as it follows two ordinary girls trying to find their identity and reunite their family.

    No Be From Hia

    185.00
  • 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.

  • Conversations About Race: Humanity Chats

    This book is for all of us.
    Introductory yet meaningful, civil, and non-political conversations about our humanity.

    Conversations about Race is a follow-up to the race-related conversations on the Humanity Chats podcast.
    May these conversations help us broaden our lens.

    The Human Oath

    We are humans
    Descendants of one species
    Connected in ways we cannot comprehend

    We are humans
    From all around the world
    One kind only
    And that is humankind

    – The Shimmigrant, 2019

  • The Valley of Memories (Hardcover)

    October 10th 1963, a Dutch teenage girl is sent away to Ghana by her resentful mother to marry a man she has met only once and who is more than twice her age. Arriving at the airport in Accra, a whole new world unfolds for this young girl. At first, she is shocked and disappointed by the things she sees in this new country she is to call her home. To her Ghana is hot, humid and dirty but then she meets the warm and welcoming people of Ghana and starts to open up to the country, culture and its people.

    Her new husbands job takes her to some of the most remote areas in Ghana from Accra to the Northern, Upper East and Volta Regions where she repeatedly has to build a home with the meagre resources her husband and herself have available. Whilst building her homes and family, she encounters the most fascinating, emotional, funny, unbelievable and sometimes scary experiences.

    This is a story about a young girl coming of age and finding love and happiness under the most unusual circumstances. The story will take the reader on a very vivid and colourful tour of life in post-colonial Ghana and gives the reader a history lesson about one of the most interesting periods Ghana has gone through after gaining independence from Britain and trying to build a strong and independent nation.

  • Zeb Silhouette

    Zeb Olima Jefferson is a bold and inspiring character. Determined to live her life according to her own rules, she travels from a dangerous relationship in Nigeria to life as an immigrant in America and then back to Nigeria again. There she faces a challenge that threatens her very sanity. This is a moving, shocking and compelling novel.

    Zeb Silhouette

    85.00
  • Travellers

    Shortlisted for the 2020 James Tait Black Memorial Prize

    Modern Europe is a melting pot of migrating souls: among them a Nigerian American couple on a prestigious arts fellowship, a transgender film student seeking the freedom of authenticity, a Libyan doctor who lost his wife and child in the waters of the Mediterranean, and a Somalian shopkeeper trying to save his young daughter from forced marriage. And, though the divide between the self-chosen exiles and those who are forced to leave home may feel solid, in reality such boundaries are endlessly shifting and frighteningly soluble.

    Moving from a Berlin nightclub to a Sicilian refugee camp to the London apartment of a Malawian poet, Helon Habila evokes a rich mosaic of migrant experiences. And through his characters’ interconnecting fates, he traces the extraordinary pilgrimages we all might make in pursuit of home.

    Travellers

    135.00
  • 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
  • Tears Fears Sweat & Blood

    The violent death of former Libya’s leader Gaddafi triggered collective brutalities against black African migrants who were often accused of supporting the late ruler. This is the unbelievable story of two innocent migrants who were wrongly accused of being mercenaries and barely lived to tell their stories.

  • When Darkness Falls Across The Desert

    Driven by the rigours of economic instabilities in a West African country during the early nineties, the author of this book sets out to pursue better living standards in an oil-rich country in North Africa. Armed with high hopes but little money, he travels to one of Africa’s poorest regions where he is persuaded to believe that the desert was the only route to his destination. He sets out on a tedious journey with other travellers including a discontented man with a very different mission, only to realize that the treacherous desert was not only dangerous but a haven for sex-starved armed bandits who were ready to rape, kill and steal the meagre belongings they have.

  • 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

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