African Love Stories: An Anthology

African Love Stories: An Anthology
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40.80 BBD

This radical collection of short stories is a double award-winning book aimed at debunking the myth about African women as impoverished victims. The stories deal with challenging themes representing some of the most complex love stories ever published from Africa, ranging from labour pains to burials, teenagers to octogenarians, race-fraught and same-sex relationships, the human heart is out there, bold bleeding and occasionally triumphant. Crafted by a stellar cast of authors including El Saadawi, Adichie, Atta, Baingana, Oyeyemi, Manyika, Aboulela, wa Goro, Badoe, Magona, Tadjo, Krog, Ogundipe, de Nyeko et al. A much welcomed addition to African literature. With contributions from 21 African women writers as follows: From Sudan Leila Aboulela From Egypt Nawal El Saadawi From Cote d'Ivoire Véronique Tadjo From Ghana Yaba Badoe From Nigeria Tomi Adeaga, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sefi Atta, Rounke Coker, Anthonia C Kalu, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Promise Ogochukwu, Molara Ogundipe, Helen Oyeyemi and Chika Unigwe. From Kenya Wangui wa Goro From South Africa Antjie Krog, Sindiwe Magona. From Uganda Monica Arac de Nyeko, Doreen Baingana and Mildred Kiconco Barya From Zimbabwe Blessing Musariri

ISBN/SKU: 
9780954702366
Publication Date: 
2006-12-19
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Death and the King's Horseman: A Play

Death and the King's Horseman: A Play
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30.00 BBD

Based on events that took place in Oyo, an ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria, in 1946, Wole Soyinka's powerful play concerns the intertwined lives of Elesin Oba, the king's chief horseman; his son, Olunde, now studying medicine in England; and Simon Pilkings, the colonial district officer. The king has died and Elesin, his chief horseman, is expected by law and custom to commit suicide and accompany his ruler to heaven. The stage is set for a dramatic climax when Pilkings learns of the ritual and decides to intervene and Elesin's son arrives home.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780393322996
Publication Date: 
2002-04-17
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Don't Let's go to the Dogs Tonight

Don't Let's go to the Dogs Tonight
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37.20 BBD

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A worthy heir to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, Alexandra Fuller shares visceral memories of her childhood in Africa, and of her headstrong, unforgettable mother.

"This is not a book you read just once, but a tale of terrible beauty to get lost in over and over."--Newsweek

"By turns mischievous and openhearted, earthy and soaring . . . hair-raising, horrific, and thrilling."--The New Yorker

Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is suffused with Fuller's endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller's debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.

From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller--known to friends and family as Bobo--grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Her father joined up on the side of the white government in the Rhodesian civil war, and was often away fighting against the powerful black guerilla factions. Her mother, in turn, flung herself at their African life and its rugged farm work with the same passion and maniacal energy she brought to everything else. Though she loved her children, she was no hand-holder and had little tolerance for neediness. She nurtured her daughters in other ways: She taught them, by example, to be resilient and self-sufficient, to have strong wills and strong opinions, and to embrace life wholeheartedly, despite and because of difficult circumstances. And she instilled in Bobo, particularly, a love of reading and of storytelling that proved to be her salvation.

Alexandra Fuller writes poignantly about a girl becoming a woman and a writer against a backdrop of unrest, not just in her country but in her home. But Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is more than a survivor's story. It is the story of one woman's unbreakable bond with a continent and the people who inhabit it, a portrait lovingly realized and deeply felt.

Praise for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

"Riveting . . . [full of] humor and compassion."--O: The Oprah Magazine

"The incredible story of an incredible childhood."--The Providence Journal

ISBN/SKU: 
0375758992
Publication Date: 
2003-03-11
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Every Day is for the Thief

Every Day is for the Thief
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29.50 BBD

A young man decides to visit Nigeria after years of absence. Ahead lies the difficult journey back to the family house and all its memories; meetings with childhood friends and above all, facing up to the paradox of Nigeria, whose present is as burdened by the past as it is facing a new future. Along the way, our narrator encounters life in Lagos. He is captivated by a woman reading on a danfo; attempts to check his email are frustrated by Yahoo boys; he is charmingly duped buying fuel. He admires the grace of an aunty, bereaved by armed robbers and is inspired by the new malls and cultural venues. The question is: should he stay or should he leave?

ISBN/SKU: 
9780571307944
Publication Date: 
2015-01-01
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Four Farcical Plays

Four Farcical Plays
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20.50 BBD
ISBN/SKU: 
1870716094
Publication Date: 
1989-01-01
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Graceland

Graceland
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45.50 BBD

Graceland is a dazzling debut by a singular new talent

The sprawling, swampy, cacophonous city of Lagos, Nigeria, provides the backdrop to the story of Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator hoping to make his way out of the ghetto. Broke, beset by floods, and beatings by his alcoholic father, and with no job opportunities in sight, Elvis is tempted by a life of crime. Thus begins his odyssey into the dangerous underworld of Lagos, guided by his friend Redemption and accompanied by a restless hybrid of voices including The King of Beggars, Sunday, Innocent and Comfort. Ultimately, young Elvis, drenched in reggae and jazz, and besotted with American film heroes and images, must find his way to a GraceLand of his own.

Nuanced, lyrical, and pitch perfect, Abani has created a remarkable story of a son and his father, and an examination of postcolonial Nigeria where the trappings of American culture reign supreme.

A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.--T. Coraghessan Boyle

ISBN/SKU: 
9780312425289
Publication Date: 
2005-01-26
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Madmen and Specialists

Madmen and Specialists
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37.40 BBD

Written in 1971, Madmen and Specialists is one of Soyinka's most excoriating portrayals of abusers and abused in the new Nigeria ushered in by Biafra and the civil war of 1967-70. Set in the "surgery" of a doctor, the play is populated by mendicants and the "insane," all fodder for "experimentation" by a shape-shifting doctor whose experiments may be more sinister than they at first appear.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780809012268
Publication Date: 
1987-09-01
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Measuring Time: A Novel

Measuring Time: A Novel
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40.90 BBD

Mamo and LaMamo are twin brothers living in the small Nigerian village of Keti, where their domineering father controls their lives. With high hopes the twins attempt to flee from home, but only LaMamo escapes successfully and is able to live their dream of becoming a soldier who meets beautiful women. Mamo, the sickly, awkward twin, is doomed to remain in the village with his father. Gradually he comes out of his father's shadow and gains local fame as a historian, and, using Plutarch's Parallel Lives as his model, he embarks on the ambitious project of writing a true history of his people. But when the rains fail and famine rages, religious zealots incite the people to violence--and LaMamo returns to fight the enemy at home.

A novel of ardent loyalty, encroaching modernity, political desire, and personal liberation, Measuring Time is a heart-wrenching history of Nigeria, portrayed through the eyes of a single family.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780393052510
Publication Date: 
2007-02-01
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Myth, Literature and the African World (Canto)

Myth, Literature and the African World (Canto)
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79.30 BBD

Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the foremost living African writers, here analyses the interconnecting worlds of myth, ritual and literature in Africa. The ways in which the African world perceives itself as a cultural entity, and the differences between its essential unity of experience and literary form and the sense of division pervading Western literature, are just some of the issues addressed. The centrality of ritual gives drama a prominent place in Soyinka's discussion, but he deals in equally illuminating ways with contemporary poetry and fiction. Above all, the fascinating insights in this book serve to highlight the importance of African criticism in addition to the literary and cultural achievements which are the subject of its penetrating analysis.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780521398343
Publication Date: 
1990-11-30
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Out of Africa

Out of Africa
Price
30.70 BBD

In 1914 Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya with her husband to run a coffee farm. Instantly drawn to the land, she spent her happiest years there until the plantation failed. Karen Blixen was forced to return to Denmark in 1931 and it was there that she wrote this classic account of her experiences. A poignant farewell to her beloved farm, Out of Africa describes her strong friendships with the people of her area, her affection for the landscape and animals, and great love for the adventurer Denys Finch-Hatton.

Written with astonishing clarity and an unsentimental intelligence, Out of Africa portrays a way of life that has disappeared for ever.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780141183336
Publication Date: 
2001-10-02
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Purple Hibiscus: A Novel

Purple Hibiscus: A Novel
Price
48.35 BBD

"One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation." --Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker

From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists


Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home--a home that is silent and suffocating.

As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father's authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins' laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.

Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781616202415
Publication Date: 
2012-04-17
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Questions of Third Cinema

Questions of Third Cinema
Price
12.33 BBD
49.30 BBD
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36.97 BBD
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Selected by Choice as an outstanding Academic Book of 1990

ISBN/SKU: 
0851702309
Publication Date: 
1990-03-01
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Seeing Double

Price
41.60 BBD
ISBN/SKU: 
0224074393
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Song for Night

Song for Night
Price
45.05 BBD

"Not since Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird or Agota Kristof's Notebook Trilogy has there been such a harrowing novel about what it's like to be a young person in a war. That Chris Abani is able to find humanity, mercy, and even, yes, forgiveness, amid such devastation is something of a miracle."--Rebecca Brown, author of The End of Youth "The moment you enter these pages, you step into a beautiful and terrifying dream. You are in the hands of a master, a literary shaman. Abani casts his spell so completely--so devastatingly--you emerge cleansed, redeemed, and utterly haunted."--Brad Kessler, author of Birds in Fall Part Inferno, part Paradise Lost, and part Sunjiata epic, Song for Night is the story of a West African boy soldier's lyrical, terrifying, yet beautiful journey through the nightmare landscape of a brutal war in search of his lost platoon. The reader is led by the voiceless protagonist who, as part of a land mine-clearing platoon, had his vocal chords cut, a move to keep these children from screaming when blown up, and thereby distracting the other minesweepers. The book is written in a ghostly voice, with each chapter headed by a line of the unique sign language these children invented. This book is unlike anything else ever written about an African war. Chris Abani is a Nigerian poet and novelist and the author of The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail (a New York Times Editor's Choice), and GraceLand (a selection of the Today Show Book Club and winner of the 2005 PEN/Hemingway Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). His other prizes include a PEN Freedom to Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He lives and teaches in California.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781933354316
Publication Date: 
2007-09-01
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Sozaboy

Sozaboy
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52.85 BBD

Sozaboy describes the fortunes of a young naive recruit in the Nigerian Civil War: from the first proud days of recruitment to the disillusionment, confusion and horror that follows. The author's use of 'rotten English' - a mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and idiomatic English - makes this a unique and powerful novel.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780582236998
Publication Date: 
1994-06-06
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The Black Insider

The Black Insider
Price
40.38 BBD
80.75 BBD
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40.37 BBD
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Outcasts inside a ruined and deserted faculty building tell of their experiences in the post-colonial disaster zone. The story reflects the writer's experience of migrancy, and his refusal of the security of belonging - either to an "African identity" or to the international literary elite.

ISBN/SKU: 
0865437351
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The Dilema of a Ghost

The Dilema of a Ghost
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46.95 BBD
ISBN/SKU: 
0582276020
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The Thing Around Your Neck

The Thing Around Your Neck
Price
77.05 BBD

From the award-winning, bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists--a dazzling story collection filled with "indelible characters who jump off the page and into your head and heart" (USA Today).

In these twelve riveting stories, the award-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780307455918
Publication Date: 
2010-06-01
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Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart
Price
30.85 BBD

"A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world." --Barack Obama

"African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe." --Toni Morrison

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read


Things Fall Apart

is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780385474542
Publication Date: 
1994-09-01
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Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Welcome to Our Hillbrow
Price
49.30 BBD

 Welcome to Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbing ride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow—microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring, and painful in the postapartheid South African psyche. Everything is there: the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that often cuts short the promise of young people’s lives, and the Africanist understanding of the life continuum that does not end with death but flows on into an ancestral realm. Infused with the rhythms of the inner-city pulsebeat, this courageous novel is compelling in its honesty and its broad vision, which links Hillbrow, rural Tiragalong, and Oxford. It spills out the guts of Hillbrow—living with the same energy and intimate knowledge with which the Drum writers wrote Sophiatown into being.

 


ISBN/SKU: 
0821419625
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What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky: Stories

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky: Stories
Price
45.00 BBD

A PBS NewsHour/New York Times Book Club Pick

A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION "5 UNDER 35" HONOREE

WINNER OF THE 2017 KIRKUS PRIZE

WINNER OF THE NYPL'S YOUNG LIONS FICTION AWARD

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE LEONARD PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE


A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home.

In "Who Will Greet You at Home," a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In "Wild," a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good," three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in "Light," a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person" - with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.

Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780735211032
Publication Date: 
2018-04-03
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