The Modern African Writing series brings the best African writing to an international audience. These groundbreaking novels, memoirs, and other literary works showcase the most talented writers of the African continent. The series also features works of significant historical and literary value translated into English for the first time. Moderately priced, the books chosen for the series are well-crafted, original, and ideally suited for African studies classes, world literature classes, or any reader looking for compelling voices of diverse African perspectives.
Ainehi Edoro
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Brittle Paper
Fine Boys
A Novel
By Eghosa Imasuen
Set in Nigeria during the pro-democracy movement and told from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old Gen-Xer, Ewaen, this coming-of-age novel examines the violent university confraternities during the mid-1990s.
Fiction | World Literature | Africa | Nigeria · Literary Fiction · Nigeria · Literature · African Studies · Fiction
The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga
By Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Larry Siems
This stirring, poetic tale features a Bedouin man whose irrepressible love for his family, his camels, and his way of life fuels his harrowing journey into the Sahara Desert to find a lost camel and his struggle to preserve a culture on the brink of profound change.
Literary Fiction · Literary Collections | African · Fiction · Mauritania · Africa | Sahara Desert · African Literature
The Cape Cod Bicycle War
and Other Stories
By Billy Kahora
Billy Kahora’s long-awaited debut collection includes stories that have appeared in Granta and McSweeney’s, and have been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing.
Short Stories (single author) · Literary Fiction · African Literature
Staging the Amistad
Three Sierra Leonean Plays
By Charlie Haffner, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, and Raymond E. D. de’Souza George
·
Edited by Matthew J. Christensen
·
Introduction by Matthew J. Christensen
Staging the Amistad collects for the first time plays about the Amistad slave revolt by three of Sierra Leone’s most influential playwrights of the latter decades of the 20th century. Written and staged before and after the start of Sierra Leone’s decade-long conflict, they brought the Amistad rebellion to public consciousness.
African Theater · Sierra Leone · Literary Collections | African · African Literature
The Wolf at Number 4
A Novel
By Ayo Tamakloe-Garr
When Desire Mensah, a disgraced school teacher in her thirties, meets Wolfgang “Wolf” Ofori, an eleven-year-old genius, a strange friendship develops between them. Set in 1990s Ghana, The Wolf at Number 4 is a chilling and funny gothic tale that forces us to confront whether the wolves around us are born or made.
Fiction · Literary Collections | African · Ghana · African Literature
The Extinction of Menai
A Novel
By Chuma Nwokolo
In the early 1980s, a pharmaceutical company administers an unethical drug trial to residents of the Niger Delta village of Kreektown. When children die as a result, the dominoes of language extinction and cultural collapse begin to topple. Nwokolo moves across time and continents to deliver a novel that speaks to urgent contemporary concerns.
Fiction · Literary Collections | African · African Literature
Tales of the Metric System
A Novel
By Imraan Coovadia
In Tales of the Metric System, Coovadia explores a turbulent South Africa from 1970 into the present. He takes his home country’s transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up and examining it from the diverse perspectives of his many characters.
Fiction · Literary Collections | African · South Africa · African Literature
The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician
A Novel
By Tendai Huchu
The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician follows three Zimbabwean expatriates in Edinburgh as they struggle to find places for themselves in Scotland. Shying from neither the political nor the personal, Huchu creates a humorous but increasingly somber picture of love, loss, belonging, and politics in the Zimbabwean diaspora.
Fiction · Literary Collections | African · Zimbabwe · African Literature
The Hairdresser of Harare
By Tendai Huchu
Set in contemporary Zimbabwe, Caine Prize finalist Tendai Huchu’s comedic and devastating novel of manners and sexual mores chronicles the rise and fall of an unconventional friendship between a single mother and a rival male hairdresser, with brutal consequences for both.
Fiction · Literary Collections | African · Zimbabwe · African Literature
Mrs. Shaw
A Novel
By Mukoma Wa Ngugi
In the fictional East African Kwatee Republic of the 1990s, the dictatorship is about to fall, and the nation’s exiles are preparing to return. One of these exiles, a young man named Kalumba, is a graduate student in the United States, where he encounters Mrs. Shaw, a professor emerita and former British settler who fled Kwatee’s postcolonial political and social turmoil.
Fiction · Literary Collections | African · African Literature
Sacred River
A Novel
By Syl Cheney-Coker
The reincarnation of a legendary nineteenth-century Caribbean emperor as a contemporary African leader is at the heart of this novel. Sacred River deals with the extraordinary lives, hopes, powerful myths, stories, and tragedies of the people of a modern West African nation. It is also the compelling love story of an idealistic philosophy professor and an ex-courtesan of incomparable beauty.
Fiction · Literary Collections | African · African Literature
491 Days
Prisoner Number 1323/69
By Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
·
Foreword by Ahmed Kathrada
On a freezing winter’s night, a few hours before dawn on May 12, 1969, South African security police stormed the Soweto home of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, activist and wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, and arrested her in the presence of her two young daughters, then aged nine and ten.Rounded up in a group of other antiapartheid activists under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act, designed for the security police to hold and interrogate people for as long as they wanted, she was taken away.
Literary Collections | Diaries & Journals · Literary Collections | African · Letters · African History · South Africa · African Studies · African Literature
Thirteen Cents
A Novel
By K. Sello Duiker
·
Introduction by Shaun Viljoen
debut fiction; South African literature; street kids; child prostitution; homosexuality; Cape Town; drug use; gritty novel; dark themes; African Literature; bildungsroman;
Fiction · Literary Collections | African · South Africa · African Literature
Sacred River
A Novel
By Syl Cheney-Coker
The reincarnation of a legendary nineteenth-century Caribbean emperor as a contemporary African leader is at the heart of this novel. Sacred River deals with the extraordinary lives, hopes, powerful myths, stories, and tragedies of the people of a modern West African nation. It is also the compelling love story of an idealistic philosophy professor and an ex-courtesan of incomparable beauty.
Fiction · Literary Collections | African · African Literature
Paper Sons and Daughters
Growing up Chinese in South Africa
By Ufrieda Ho
Ufrieda Ho’s compelling memoir describes with intimate detail what it was like to come of age in the marginalized Chinese community of Johannesburg during the apartheid era of the 1970s and 1980s. The Chinese were mostly ignored, as Ho describes it, relegated to certain neighborhoods and certain jobs, living in a kind of gray zone between the blacks and the whites. As long as they adhered to these rules, they were left alone.
Fiction · Literary Collections | African · Women Authors · South Africa · African Literature
