The Living Days

The Living Days

Ananda Devi

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

"Brutal and entirely believable, a gorgeous and haunting depiction of London and the real lives and memories of those unseen within it." —Publishers Weekly "A magnificent gem." —Jennifer Croft, translator of Flights A chance encounter on Portobello Road incites an unsettling, magnetic attraction between Mary, a seventy-five-year-old white British spinster, and Cub, a thirteen-year-old Jamaican boy from Brixton. Mary clings increasingly to phantoms as dementia overtakes her reality, latching on to Cub and channeling her remaining energy into their relationship. But their macabre romance comes to a horrific climax, as white supremacy, poverty, and class conflict explode on the streets of London. Through exquisite juxtaposition, Ananda Devi uses alluring prose to confront the tensions of an increasingly nationalistic metropolis, and to examine the queasy nature of desire muddled with power.
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Pet

Pet

Akwaeke Emezi

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

The highly-anticipated, genre-defying new novel by award-winning author Akwaeke Emezi that explores themes of identity and justice. Pet is here to hunt a monster. Are you brave enough to look?There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with this lesson all their life. But when Jam meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colors and claws, who emerges from one of her mother's paintings and a drop of Jam's blood, she must reconsider what she's been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster, and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption's house. Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and the answer to the question—How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?Acclaimed novelist Akwaeke Emezi makes their riveting and timely young adult debut with a book that asks difficult questions about...
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Oberon's Gift

Oberon's Gift

Richard Dante

Northern Africa / Morocco / Cultural / Africa

For centuries the Good Fairies of Neverneverland have used their magic to push worthy humans to power and fame. Then, in 1982 they send their emissary, Oberon, to contactGeorge Bertram Potter, a brilliant political science graduate student. What follows is a lighthearted romp though the halls of show business and politics.Readers of Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, James Patterson and Nora Roberts will enjoy this fast-paced international thriller.One spectacular financial scheme. One woman alone against the world. Young, beautiful, and yearning for love, Heather Bancroft meets the "perfect" man...and is lured into a game in which she begins to make more money than she ever imagined. Betrayed by her own innocence, she loses all that is dear to her and discovers that she has been mercilessly used. Defeated and broken, but surviving with sheer persistence and ingenuity, Heather emerges from her trying ordeal, determined to punish the ruthless man who destroyed her life. Her thirst for revenge takes her halfway around the globe, to the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean, where her nemesis secludes himself in obscene wealth that he's gained from the financial ruin of others. Heather is playing for the highest stakes in a lethal game. Only one man loves her - he's handsome, confident, and just as determined as she is. Only one man can stop her - a criminal mastermind who is intent on her destruction.From Jayne Lockwood ReviewsThis is another enormously enjoyable read from Mr. Wells. Heather is young, beautiful, living and working in New York City. There she gets involved in a dangerous game which seems to be the answer to all her financial worries. AND she meets her perfect man. Life is going swimmingly until she loses everything and has to claw it back, pitting her wits against an elusive millionaire whose get rich quick schemes have resulted in the ruination of countless other people. There is intrigue, tension, international travel, glamour, gleaming yachts, designer clothes, beautiful women, peril on the streets of Paris, murder and sex. It's all in there, a luscious mix of Sidney Sheldon and Shirley Conran, updated and fresh enough to stand tall in the 21st century. I could not put this book down. It was a huge amount of fun but more than that, it has stayed with me and is definitely one I will be recommending to anyone who wants a more than just a sexy romp through a millionaire's playground.Reviewed by David Savage, What's Good to Do Magazine A story of money, greed, scams, revenge and love! A 24 year old PR assistant, Heather Bancroft, is one of the people caught up in an elaborate scam. She starts to receive strange emails predicting the outcomes of things she can bet on...and these bets take her around the world to Japan onto Istanbul... A very well-written series of books where the pace does not let up from Book 1 to the final pages of Book 5. Filled with twists and turns that grab your attention and keep you reading...suspense and thrills and keeps you on the edge on your seat wanting more. A highly entertaining read, it has to be one of the best stories I have read in years.
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The Alternative

The Alternative

Richard Dante

Northern Africa / Morocco / Cultural / Africa

In the not too distant future, the world is threatened with drought and starvation. Washington’s elite are invited to a mysterious gala at a giant old movie house. There, they become part of the entertainment, and meet the Primagnon, a more-than-human-being, who offers...The Alternative.
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A Fire in My Head

A Fire in My Head

Ben Okri

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

A powerful collection of new and recently completed poems by Ben Okri covering topics of the day, such as the refugee crisis, racism, Obama, the Grenfell Tower fire, and the Corona outbreak. In our times of crisis The mind has its powers This book brings together many of Ben Okri's most acclaimed and politically charged poems. Some of them, like 'Grenfell Tower, June 2017', are already familiar. Published in the Financial Times less than ten days after the fire, it was played more than 6 million times on Channel 4's Facebook page, and was retweeted by thousands on Twitter. 'Notre-Dame is Telling Us Something' was first read on BBC Radio 4, in the aftermath of the cathedral's near destruction. It spoke eloquently of the despair that was felt around the world. In 'shaved head poem', Ben Okri wrote of the confusion and anxiety felt as the world grappled with a health crisis unprecedented in our times. 'Breathing...
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Little Rot

Little Rot

Akwaeke Emezi

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY HARPER'S BAZAAR, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, BOOKPAGE AND MORE!"Emezi unspools a web of erotic danger in their entertaining latest...readers in search of a decadent good time will find it here."–Publishers WeeklyA thrilling new novel from the bestselling, award-winning, visionary Akwaeke Emezi   One weekend. The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city. A party that goes awry. A tangled web of sex and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed. Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from the breakup, visits an exclusive sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally and suddenly upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, collide into the scene just as everything...
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Dear Senthuran

Dear Senthuran

Akwaeke Emezi

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

FEATURED ON THE COVER OF TIME MAGAZINE AS A 2021 NEXT GENERATION LEADER“A once-in-a-generation voice.” – Vulture “One of our greatest living writers.” – ShondalandA full-throated and provocative memoir in letters from the New York Times-bestselling author, “a dazzling literary talent whose works cut to the quick of the spiritual self.” —EsquireIn 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...
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The Freedom Artist

The Freedom Artist

Ben Okri

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

One of 2019's most anticipated novels in THE TIMES, IRISH TIMES and GUARDIAN. 'Where fiction's master of enchantments stares down a real horror, and without blinking or flinching, produces a work of beauty, grace and uncommon power' MARLON JAMES, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2015. An impassioned plea for freedom and justice, set in a world uncomfortably like our own, by the Man Booker-winner Ben Okri. In a world uncomfortably like our own, a young woman called Amalantis is arrested for asking a question. Her question is this: Who is the Prisoner? When Amalantis disappears, her lover Karnak goes looking for her. He searches desperately at first, then with a growing realization. To find Amalantis, he must first understand the meaning of her question. Karnak's search leads him into a terrifying world of lies, oppression and fear at the heart of which lies the Prison. Then...
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Stars of the New Curfew

Stars of the New Curfew

Ben Okri

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

To enter the world of Ben Okri's stories is to surrender to a new reality. Set in the chaotic streets of Lagos and the jungle heart of Nigeria, all the laws of cause and effect, fact and fiction, are suspended. It is a world where the lives of the powerless veer terrifyingly close to nightmare. In rich, lyrical, almost hallucinatory prose Ben Okri guides us through the fabulous and the mundane, the serene and the randomly violent. The unrelenting Nigerian heat and the implacable darkness of the black-out and the military curfew are the backdrops for his characters each finding their own ways to survive. We witness their dogged resistance to impotence, their unquenchable humour and their insistence on the possibility of love in the face of terror. Written with the lucid clarity and logic of dream, Stars of the New Curfew is a book of visionary imagination.
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Incidents at the Shrine

Incidents at the Shrine

Ben Okri

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

Incidents at the Shrine is the first collection of stories by the author of 1991 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Famished Road. Whether the subject is a child's eye view of the Nigerian Civil War, Lagos and the spirit world or dispossession in a decaying British inner city, Okri's lyrical, poetic and humorous prose recreates the known and the unknown world with startling power.
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The Death of Comrade President

The Death of Comrade President

Alain Mabanckou

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

In Pointe-Noire, in the small neighbourhood of Voungou, on the family plot where young Michel lives with Maman Pauline and Papa Roger, life goes on. But Michel's everyday cares - lost grocery money, the whims of his parents' moods, their neighbours' squabbling, his endless daydreaming - are soon swept away by the wind of history. In March 1977, just before the arrival of the short rainy season, Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is brutally murdered in Brazzaville, and not even naïve Michel can remain untouched. Starting as a tender, wry portrait of an ordinary Congolese family, Alain Mabanckou quickly expands the scope of his story into a powerful examination of colonialism, decolonization and dead ends of the African continent. At a stroke Michel learns the realities of life - and how much must change for everything to stay the same.
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The Butcher of Casablanca

The Butcher of Casablanca

Abdelilah Hamdouchi

Mystery / Cultural / Africa

A serial killer taunts Casablanca's most famous detective, Hanash, in this nail-biting Moroccan noir, a follow-up to Bled Dry A series of gruesome murders shakes the city of Casablanca. The killer knows exactly how the police will pursue him and how to obliterate evidence that could lead them to identify his victims. Fear spreads throughout the city as rumors abound that a serial killer is on the loose. Detective Hanash, despite his reputation, has hit a dead end. But he knows the killer will make a mistake, and it is up to him and his team to hunt down and capture this brutal criminal. Then comes the most audacious homicide yet: the victim is found on the first day of the Eid holiday, directly outside the police headquarters in the center of town. Is the killer taunting the police and its famous detective? And could this be the crime that contains the clue that Hanash has been waiting for?
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The Death of Vivek Oji

The Death of Vivek Oji

Akwaeke Emezi

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

"Electrifying." — O Magazine Named one of the year's most anticipated books by The New York Times, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, BuzzFeed, and moreWhat does it mean for a family to lose a child they never really knew? One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son's body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family's struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. 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 warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek's closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited...
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Tiger Work

Tiger Work

Ben Okri

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

'Both a work of lyrical imagination and a warning about the dangers we will face unless we take immediate action' New Yorker 'An artist's ardent plea for change' Kirkus This earth that we love is in grave danger because of us. Forests are becoming legends, rare as unicorns...If we continue to live as we do now, there will be no world left for us to fix, Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri argues in this evocative collection. He imagines messages – sent to us from beyond the end, from those who saw it coming – exhorting us to change now.Combining fiction, essay and poetry, Tiger Work displays Okri's classic blend of storytelling, fantasy and magic.
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The Hunter and the Whale

The Hunter and the Whale

Laurens Van Der Post

Fiction / Cultural / Africa

This is the story of a South African boy, Peter, who grows to manhood through a hard course of physical and emotional experiences. The scene, a heroic one, is set both on sea and on land. Peter is exposed to the conflicts set up by other characters, chief amongst whom are a dedicated and fanatical whaling captain, a Zulu stoker, a famous white hunter and his daughter. He learns how men can become obsessed by greed and the will to power; and he witnesses the struggle of natural man to come to terms with the demands of contemporary life. Peter's developing relationship with captain and crew; the fury and beauty of the chase; the fanaticism of the two great hunters -- these are the leading motifs in Laurens van der Post's stirring narrative. His remarkable knowledge of whaling, and the force of his imagination sounding deeper then leviathan himself, carry the reader irresistibly forwards.
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