Book Review Suggestions

For Undergraduates:

Ken Saro-Wiwa – Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English  (An account of the Nigerian civil war narrated in pidgin)

Ben Okri –The Famished Road (Okri’s magnum opus – a magical realist tale of an abiku, or spirit-child)

Sefi Atta – Swallow (Two young female office workers in Lagos in the 1980s are tempted into drug trafficking)

Chika Unigwe – On Black Sisters Street (Four African women leave their home countries to work in Antwerp’s red-light district)

Helon Habila – Oil on Water (A journalist seeks out a British woman kidnapped in the Niger Delta)

Helon Habila – Measuring Time (Twin brothers growing up in a small village – one becomes a soldier, the other is   left behind)

Adoabi Tricia Nwaubani – I Do Not Come to You By Chance (Email scams!)

Nnedi Okafor – Who Fears Death? (Post-apocalyptic, futuristic Africa)

Helen Oyeyemi – The Icarus Girl  (A gothic horror tale about a Nigerian girl growing up in Britain)

Teju Cole – Open City  (A Nigerian psychiatrist wanders through New York City and Brussels)

The Granta Book of the African Short Story  (A brand new collection edited by Helon Habila)

Jude Dibia  ­– Walking with Shadows (The only African novel – that I know of – that is predominantly about male homosexuality)

Unoma Azuah – Edible Bones (An existential tale of an illegal Nigerian immigrant in post-9/11 America)

Note:  For the most part (with the exception of Saro-Wiwa and Okri) I have suggested contemporary novels written in the past decade or so.  While you are not obligated to choose one of these and may certainly go for classics by authors such as Soyinka, Achebe, Tutuloa, etc. (or any other Nigerian work of fiction), I think it would be great to get reviews of the “new stuff” up on Amazon.  I’ve tried to select works here that wouldn’t overlap with books we’ve already read and that might provide you with new storylines or styles of writing, but this is really the space for you to find works that appeal to you.  Also, for anyone interested in the last 3 selections on the list, they may be hard to find.  Please contact me and I can arrange to find a copy for you.

For Graduate Students:

Rudi Gaudio – Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City

Susan Andrade – The National Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms

Rahul Rao – Third World Protest: Between Home and the World

Akin Adesokan – Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics

Joseph Slaughter – Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law

Ruth Marshall – Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria

Charles Piot – Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa After the Cold War

AbdouMaliq Simone – For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities

Achille Mbembe – On the Postcolony

Ralph Austen and Mahir Saul, ed. –Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution

Henrietta Moore and Todd Sanders, ed. – Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa