Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

This is Chinua Achebe's classic novel, with more than two million copies sold since its first U.S. publication in 1969. Combining a richly African story with the author's keen awareness of the qualities common to all humanity, Achebe here shows that he is "gloriously gifted, with the magic of an ebullient, generous, great talent." -- Nadine Gordimer

Half of a Yellow Sun

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,” Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed. ...

Purple Hibiscus: A Novel

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A haunting tale of an Africa and an adolescence undergoing tremendous changes by a talented young Nigerian writer. Fifteen-year-old Kambili's world is circumscribed by the high walls of her family compound and the frangipani trees she can see from her bedroom window. Her wealthy Catholic father, although generous and well-respected in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. Her life is... (more)

Disgrace

by J. M. Coetzee

Disgrace --set in post--apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape--is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love. At fifty--two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and... (more)

Anthills of the Savannah

by Chinua Achebe

Using the conflict between the city and tribal villages, the ravages of the great African drought, and Third World politics as a compelling backdrop, Achebe weaves a potent drama of modern Africa.

The Joys of Motherhood (African Writers Series)

The Joys of Motherhood (African Writers Series)

by Buchi Emecheta

Nnu Ego is a woman who gives all her energy, money and everything she has to raising her children - leaving her little time to make friends.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

by Ishmael Beah

My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life. “Why did you leave Sierra Leone?” “Because there is a war.” “You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?” “Yes, all the time.” “Cool.” I smile a little. “You should tell us about it sometime.” “Yes, sometime.” This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s.... (more)

Cry, the Beloved Country

by Alan Paton

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley. For fear will rob him of all if... (more)

Nervous Conditions

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

The Grass Is Singing (Penguin Reading Lab Level 5)

The Grass Is Singing (Penguin Reading Lab Level 5)

by Doris Lessing

Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the... (more)

Life and Times of Michael K: A Novel

by J. M. Coetzee, Michael Coetzee

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael K goes to the centre of human experience -- the need for an interior, spiritual life, for some... (more)

Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa

Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa

by Sherley Ann Williams, Mark Mathabane

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself... (more)

The Famished Road

by Ben Okri

In the decade since it won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri's Famished Road has become a classic. Like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, it combines brilliant narrative technique with a fresh vision to create an essential work of world literature. The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku , a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life... (more)

Foe: A Novel (King Penguin)

by J. M. Coetzee

'A small miracle of a book ...of marvellous intricacy and overwhelming power' - "The Washington Post", Book World. Coetzee reinvents the story of "Robinson Crusoe", directing our attention to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself.

July's People

by Nadine Gordimer

When South Africa is riven by war and the Smales, a white couple, take refuge in the village of their former servant July, their relationships are completely transformed.

Ake: The Years of Childhood

by Wole Soyinka

When he was 4 years old, spurred by insatiable curiosity and the beat of a marching drum, Wole Soyinka slipped silently through the gate of his parents' yard and followed a police band to a distant village. This was his first journey beyond Aké, Nigeria, and reading his account is akin to witnessing a child's epiphany: The parsonage wall had vanished forever but it no longer mattered. Those token bits and... (more)

Ancestor Stones: A Novel

by Aminatta Forna

The author of the rapturously acclaimed memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water seamlessly turns her hand to fiction and delivers a novel that is a lush and beautiful portrait of several generations of African women. In Ancestor Stones , a young woman from West Africa, who has lived in England for many years, returns after years of civil war. The family's coffee plantation has been placed in her hands, and... (more)

The Book of Chameleons

by Jose? Eduardo Agualusa

This unusual novel about the landscape of memory and its inconsistencies follows Felix Ventura as he trades in a curious commodity—he sells people different pasts. He can create entirely new pasts full of better memories and complete with new lineage or augment existing pasts as needed. Narrated by an exceptionally articulate and rather friendly lizard that lives on Felix’s living-room wall, this richly detailed... (more)

Novels. (English.)

by Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz's magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time. The Nobel Prize—winning writer's masterwork is the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain's occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century. The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who... (more)

So Long a Letter

by Mariama Ba

An intense and poised novel in the form of a letter written by Ramatoulaye, who has recently been widowed.

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: african literature

by Chinua Achebe

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

by J. M. Coetzee

by Chinua Achebe

by Buchi Emecheta

by Ishmael Beah

by Alan Paton

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

by Doris Lessing

by J. M. Coetzee, Michael Coetzee

by Sherley Ann Williams, Mark Mathabane

by Ben Okri

by J. M. Coetzee

by Nadine Gordimer

by Wole Soyinka

by Aminatta Forna

by Jose? Eduardo Agualusa

by Naguib Mahfouz

by Mariama Ba