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Manuwa Street
“Lagos brings you alive. Lagos kills you. Here, you’ll be wrong about everything. Here, you won’t have anything to worry about. Lagos creates as many millionaires as it sends poor people to the mat. Here, Nature abounds as much as it self-destructs. And never, you humans, despite your beliefs and certainties, have you ever wanted to live so much. In the midst of this overflow, this too many people, this too much waste, injustices, parties and excesses. Of everything you’ve tried to ignore until now.”
French journalist Sophie Bouillon documents living in Lagos in 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown. As a journalist, she gets out of her night to go and write the dispatch that will announce to the world that Africa, in turn, is affected by this “white virus” that is bringing the West to its knees.
In this thoughtful narrative non-fiction, Bouillon explores everyday life in Lagos through experiences from her career and personal life. In one unforgettable year, the city was rocked by explosions, evictions and protests. A city that never sleeps put to bed by the pandemic. Manuwa Street is the impressive story of a year that will end with the uprising of a people. It is also and above all a hypnotic and luminous dive into a city that never lets up, meeting men and women struggling with the din of the world.
But Manuwa Street isn’t just a disinterested documentation of a foreigner’s impression of Lagos; it is about love, uncertainty, hope and survival.
₵75.00Manuwa Street
₵75.00 -
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
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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?
₵95.00The Whispering Trees
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The Days of Silence
Osasé has a secret she cannot share.
Not even with her two sisters and mother, as they all battle to cope with the complexities of sisterhood, the fragile balances in mother-daughter relationships, and the deep scars of marriages gone awry. The story traces Osasé’s girl-to-woman journey of self-discovery from Kano, to Abuja, to Grenoble, and her fight for survival as her life slowly comes undone at the seams. The heart-warming narrative is reminiscent of Little Women but modern, urban, and with a blindsiding twist in the tale.
The Days of Silence is a poignant coming-of-age story about identity, the unbreakable bonds of family, displacement, survival, and the triumph of a woman’s spirit.
₵110.00The Days of Silence
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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.
₵115.00Freshwater
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Season Of Crimson Blossoms
WINNER OF THE NLNG NIGERIA PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
An affair between 55-year-old widow Binta Zubairu and 25-year-old weed dealer Reza was bound to provoke condemnation in conservative Northern Nigeria. Brought together in unusual circumstances, Binta and Reza faced a need they could only satisfy in each other. Binta – previously reconciled with God – now yearns for intimacy after the sexual repression of her marriage, the pain of losing her first son and the privations of widowhood. Meanwhile, Reza’s heart lies empty and waiting to be filled due to the absence of a mother. The situation comes to a head when Binta’s wealthy son confronts Reza, with disastrous consequences. This story of love and longing – set against undercurrents of political violence – unfurls gently, revealing layers of emotion that defy age, class and religion.
₵120.00Season Of Crimson Blossoms
₵120.00 -
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.
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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
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The Cabal
Bako Thomas lives a solitary life, a calm centre in an increasingly unstable world. The City outside his apartment is sliding towards a dystopia as a fuel crisis holds citizens to ransom. He is down to his final chance with Avé, his girlfriend of two years, and his relationships with his neighbours, The Law, Gebu and Mimi is fraught with anxiety and tension. When a tragedy forces him to go on the run, he soon finds himself being roped into the murky world of politics and corruption he thought he had left behind for good.
₵125.00The Cabal
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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.
₵135.00Travellers
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The Madhouse
A house brings two unique people together by the unlikeliest of chances. In their union, that of an almost priest and a prodigal daughter, two brothers whose bond transcend the laws of nature are born.
André and Max have a seemingly blissful life until the boys start sharing dreams and their lives begin to unravel. Murderous thoughts, manic dreams, and their somewhat unbreakable wandering between reality and reverie, would lead them down unknown paths that threaten to severe their family ties.
In this exhilarating and dreamy narration set against the backdrop of a tumultuous era of military rule in Nigeria, TJ Benson weaves a spellbinding tale about the clashes between cultures, the impact of fragile political situations on everyday people, and the lengths we are willing to go in order to save our loved ones.
₵135.00The Madhouse
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The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa
Fifteen-year-old Andrew Aziza lives in Kontagora, Nigeria, where his days are spent about town with his droogs, Slim and Morocca, grappling with his fantasies about white girls–especially blondes–and wondering who his father is. When he’s not in church, at school or attempting to form ‘Africa’s first superheroes’, he obsesses over mathematical theorems, ideas of black power and HXVX: the Curse of Africa.
Sure enough, the reluctantly nicknamed ‘Andy Africa’ soon falls hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on, Eileen. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. An unfamiliar man claims, despite his mother’s denials, to be Andy’s father, and the gathering of an anti-Christian mob is headed for the church—both set to shake the foundations of everything Andy knows and loves.
The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa announces a dazzling, distinctive, new literary voice. Profound, exhilarating and highly original, this tragicomic novel is a stunning exploration of the contemporary African ‘condition’, the relentless infiltration of Western culture and, most of all, the ordinary but impossible challenges of coming of age in a turbulent world.
The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa won second prize in the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award while still in manuscript form.
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People Live Here
Kanulia is a 25 year old single-mother whose quest for a better job that will help her raise her son in the post-PMS subsidy removal crises of January 2012 lands her a foreign-aid nursing work in Sana’a in the after-math of the Yemeni-Uprising the previous year. With the cast of eccentric yet friendly coworkers from all over the world, she eases into the old city, takes in the architecture. She begins a journey of friendship, trauma and rediscovery that will bring her back to Nigeria a changed woman, even though she is initially unaware of it, it’s a change that will save lives at the crisis stricken Northern borders of her country.
₵135.00People Live Here
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A Good Name
Twelve years in America and Eziafa Okereke has nothing to show for it. Desperate to re-write his story, Eziafa returns to Nigeria to find a woman he can mold to his taste. Eighteen-year-old Zina has big dreams. An arranged marriage to a much older man isn’t one of them. Trapped by family expectations, Zina marries Eziafa, moves to Houston, and trains as a nurse. Buffeted by a series of disillusions, the couple stagger through a turbulent marriage until Zina decides to change the rules of engagement.
₵135.00A Good Name
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And Then He Sang a Lullaby
And Then He Sang a Lullaby is a breathtaking and captivating story of two gay men who find each other in Nigeria and are determined to love despite all that stands in their way.
August is a straight-passing track star who has left Enugu, his overbearing sisters, and an apathetic father to find himself at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. Segun is an openly gay student who is reluctant to fall in love with August, wanting only to be with a man who is comfortable with his sexuality and has the capacity to love without shame. But when the Same Sex (Marriage) Prohibition Act is passed, August and Segun must find a way to tend to their blossoming romance in a country determined to eradicate them. And even while they run into harshness and cruelty at the hands of people whose lives and loves are legal, the two young lovers find kindness, understanding, solace and comfort in the arms of each other and in unexpected places.
₵140.00And Then He Sang a Lullaby
₵140.00