2023 Read Widely: Sub-Saharan Africa

"A provocative debut novel about a British Ghanaian marriage in crisis that asks the question: Can you ever be rooted in a home that's on the brink of collapse? It seemed everyone knew Efe and Sam were meant to be--everyone except for Efe and Sam. Efe, newly arrived in the UK from Ghana and sinking under the weight of her parents' expectations, finds comfort in the focused and idealistic Sam, also Ghanaian, but for whom the UK feels like home. He's...

"When her dreams of rising through the police ranks like her late father crash around her, 26-year-old Emma Djan is unsure what will become of her life in Accra. Through a sympathetic former colleague, Emma gets an interview with a private detective agency tracking down missing persons, thefts, and marital infidelities. It's not the future she imagined, but it's her best option. Meanwhile, Gordon Tilson, a middle-aged widower in Washington, DC, has...

“A page turner of a story, intriguing characters—Jade is particularly memorable—and a wealth of South African color . . . At once brutal and beautiful” (Richmond Times-Dispatch).
 
In Johannesburg, prosperous whites live in gated communities; when they exit their cars to open the gates, car-jackings are common. But seldom is the victim killed, much less shot twice, like Annette...

"Perfect for readers of The Secret Life of Bees and The Help, a perceptive and searing look at Apartheid-era South Africa, told through one unique family brought together by tragedy. Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a ten-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles...

Presents a collection of short stories centering around Nigerian women as they build lives out of hope, faith, and doubt, following such characters as a young woman faced with a dangerous decision to save her mother and a woman in love with another despite the penalties.

"When the army officer Chike Ameobi is ordered to kill innocent civilians, he knows it is time to desert his post. As he travels toward Lagos with Yemi, his junior officer, and into the heart of a political scandal involving Nigeria's education minister, Chike becomes the leader of a new platoon, a band of runaways who share his desire for a different kind of life. Among them are Fineboy, a fighter with a rebel group, desperate to pursue his dream...

"A tender, potent, and compulsively readable novel of a Nigerian-Indian family and the deeply held secret that tests their traditions and bonds"-- Southeastern Nigeria. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives,...

"Meet Persephone Wilder, a displaced genius posing as the wife of an American diplomat in Namibia. Persephone takes her job as a representative of her country seriously, coming up with an intricate set of rules to survive the problems she encounters: how to dress in hundred-degree weather without showing too much skin, how not to look drunk at embassy functions, and how to eat roasted oryx with grace. She also suspects her husband is not actually...

Ben Rawlence interweaves the stories of nine individuals to show what life is like in the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya, and to sketch the wider political forces that keep half a million refugees trapped there. Lucid, vivid and illuminating, City of Thorns tells an urgent human story.

"A powerful, emotional debut novel told in the unforgettable voice of a young Nigerian woman who is trapped in a life of servitude but determined to get an education so that she can escape and choose her own future. Adunni is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who knows what she wants: an education. This, her mother has told her, is the only way to get a "louding voice"--the ability to speak for herself and decide her own future. But instead, Adunni's...