Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Madonna of Excelsior: A Novel

by Zakes Mda

"A generous, patient, wry and intelligent voice...<that> suggests not just a writer who can seduce us through beautiful language and unfailing humor. We also encounter a writer who has the power to shock and frighten us, to astound and anger and unsettle us...In short, his is a voice for which one should feel not only affection but admiration." --Neil Gordon, New York Times Book Review Selection, Summer... (more)

Power of One

by Bryce Courtenay

In this magical novel, an irresistible boy tells the story of his survival and coming of age against the background of South Africa during and just after World War II.

Left To Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

Left To Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

by Immacule?e Ilibagiza

Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee’s family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans. Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women... (more)

King Leopold's Ghost

A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

by Adam Hochschild

In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts... (more)

Acts of Faith (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Philip Caputo

Philip Caputo’s tragic and epically ambitious new novel is set in Sudan, where war is a permanent condition. Into this desolate theater come aid workers, missionaries, and mercenaries of conscience whose courage and idealism sometimes coexist with treacherous moral blindness. There’s the entrepreneurial American pilot who goes from flying food and medicine to smuggling arms, the Kenyan aid worker who can’t help... (more)

Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa

Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa

by Wendy Kann

In this poignant, lyric memoir, a sister’s tragic death prompts a woman’s unbidden journey into her turbulent African past A comfortable suburban housewife with three children living in Connecticut, Wendy Kann thought she had put her volatile childhood in colonial Rhodesia—now Zimbabwe—behind her. Then one Sunday morning came a terrible phone call: her youngest sister, Lauren, had been killed on a lonely road... (more)

Skinner's Drift: A Novel

by Lisa Fugard

Ten years after leaving South Africa, Eva van Rensburg returns to her dying father, a violent stuttering man whose terrible secret Eva has kept since she was a child, and to Skinner's Drift, the family farm, a tough stretch of land on the Limpopo River where jackals and leopards still roam. In this beautiful, brave, and extraordinarily moving first novel, Lisa Fugard paints a haunting portrait of a young woman... (more)

There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Africa's Children

There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Africa's Children

by Melissa Fay Greene

There Is No Me Without You is the story of Haregewoin Tefarra, a middle-aged Ethiopian woman of modest means whose home has become a refuge for hundreds of children orphaned by AIDS. It is a story as much about the power of the bond between children and parents as about the epidemic that every year leaves millions of children, mostly healthy themselves, without family. Originally a middle-class woman with a happy... (more)

Game Control: A Novel (P.S.)

by Lionel Shriver

Eleanor Merritt, a do-gooding American family-planning worker, was drawn to Kenya to improve the lot of the poor. Unnervingly, she finds herself falling in love with the beguiling Calvin Piper despite, or perhaps because of, his misanthropic theories about population control and the future of the human race. Surely, Calvin whispers seductively in Eleanor's ear, if the poor are a responsibility they are also an... (more)

Triomf

by Marlene Van Niekerk

The white, working-class neighborhood of Triomf, a suburb of western Johannesburg erected over the rubble of Sophiatown, from which hundreds of black families were forcibly removed in the 1950s, is the setting for Marlene van Niekerk's internationally acclaimed, multi-layered novel of modern South Africa. Triomf shines a harrowing and vividly colorful, often hilarious, light on the lives and daily routines of a... (more)

The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey

The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey

by Adam Hochschild

History lies heavily on South Africa, and Adam Hochschild brings to bear a lifetime's familiarity with the country in an eye-opening work that blends history and reportage. Hochschild looks at the tensions of modern South Africa through a dramatic prism: the pivotal nineteenth-century Battle of Blood River -- which determined whether the Boers or the Zulus would control that part of the world -- and its... (more)

Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa

Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa

by Padraig O'Malley

The inside story of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, told through the experiences of one of its unsung heroes, with an introduction by Nelson Mandela A South African of Indian descent, Mac Maharaj was a potent force in the Communist Party and African National Congress for nearly four decades. Tortured by South African security forces, he served twelve years in prison with Nelson Mandela and was... (more)

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)

Power Lines : Two Years on South Africa's Borders

Power Lines : Two Years on South Africa's Borders

by Jason Carter

A land of tension and segregation, relatively unchanged since Nelson Mandela’s release from prison nearly a decade ago, South Africa is a country fraught with deep racial divides. While white citizens enjoy lifestyles similar to Westerners, black citizens inhabit a world of poverty and deprivation. Despite Mandela’s regime-shattering election as President, there has been little improvement in the ability of the... (more)

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents' jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration with... (more)

Tropical Fish: Tales From Entebbe

by Doreen Baingana

In her fiction debut, Doreen Baingana follows a Ugandan girl as she navigates the uncertain terrain of adolescence. Set mostly in pastoral Entebbe with stops in the cities Kampala and Los Angeles, Tropical Fish depicts the reality of life for Christine Mugisha and her family after Idi Amin’s dictatorship. Three of the eight chapters are told from the point of view of Christine’s two older sisters, Patti, a... (more)

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

by Peter Godwin

After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downwards into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been... (more)

Gem Squash Tokoloshe

by Rachel Zadok

She just sat there hardly moving, staring at the drive. Black marks formed under her eyes where her lashes bled their waxy coating onto her skin. Her rouged cheeks were smudged. Mother looked like she was melting in the heat. Faith leads an isolated existence on her family's drought stricken farm in the Northern Transvaal of South Africa. When the rain stopped, her father took to the road as a travelling salesman,... (more)

The House at Sugar Beach: A Memoir

by Helene Cooper

Helene Cooper is "Congo," a descendant of two Liberian dynasties -- traced back to the first ship of freemen that set sail from New York in 1820 to found Monrovia. Helene grew up at Sugar Beach, a twenty-two-room mansion by the sea. Her childhood was filled with servants, flashy cars, a villa in Spain, and a farmhouse up-country. It was also an African childhood, filled with knock foot games and hot pepper soup,... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: tbr: africa

by Zakes Mda

by Bryce Courtenay

by Immacule?e Ilibagiza

A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

by Adam Hochschild

by Philip Caputo

by Wendy Kann

by Lisa Fugard

by Melissa Fay Greene

by Lionel Shriver

by Marlene Van Niekerk

by Adam Hochschild

by Padraig O'Malley

by Ishmael Beah

by Jason Carter

by Dinaw Mengestu

by Doreen Baingana

by Peter Godwin

by Rachel Zadok

by Helene Cooper