Summer reading: five new novels

This month’s Library Highlight features five brand new novels from leading African authors for you to enjoy over the summer. Come pick up the latest writings by Nnedi Okorafor, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ben Okri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu at the African Library!

Death of the author / Nnedi Okorafor
In her latest novel Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor writes a work of fiction intertwined with science fiction. Her protagonist Zelu has faced many challenges in life, but as she reaches a new low, she makes a life-altering decision: she embarks on writing a science fiction story. The book is a huge success and life changes for the better. But as often, changes for the good also come with downsides.

Theft / Abdulrazak Gurnah
In this new book Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah tells the story of three teenagers growing up in 1990s Tanzania. The main characters, two boys and a girl, are from different backgrounds, but life brings them into close contact. A friendship develops, but as time goes by, and different events unfold, these close relationships turn out difficult to maintain under the influence of each person’s past, and Tanzania’s social and political present.

Madame Sosostris and the festival for the brokenhearted / Ben Okri
Booker Prize winner Ben Okri in this story writes about Londoner Viv, who comes up with the unusual idea of celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the day her first husband left her by organising a masked ball in a sacred wood in the south of France. Special guest for the feast is Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante - based on a character from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. She is there to help the brokenhearted. But the night takes an unexpected course.

Dream count / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - writer of Americanah and We should all be feminists - writes about four women during the pandemic: Chiamaka, Nigerian travel writer living in the US; her best friend Zikora, successful lawyer and single mother; her cousin Omelogor, who works in finance in Nigeria; and Kadiatou, her Guinean housekeeper raising a teenage daughter alone. These four women each struggle with their own choices, in life and love.

The creation of half-broken people / Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
In this Gothic novel Zimbabwean writer Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu tells the tale of an African woman who works for a British museum filled with African artifacts, in the hands of a family foundation of descendants from Captain John Good - a character from the classic novel King Solomon's Mines. The protagonist is happy with her job, until she starts having visions inhabited by  “half-broken” women, confronting her with her own heritage and past.

The African Library will stay open during the summer, please check the adjusted summer schedule, in effect from 7 July to 31 August.

Germa Seuren