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LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Avni Doshi's Top Ten Books

“I think bad writing is essential,” Avni Doshi told The Rumpus. “Bad writing is the most important thing for learning how to write.” It took eight drafts before Doshi felt ready to publish her debut novel, Burnt Sugar, but the revisions paid off: the book landed on the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist. Built around a knotty mother-daughter relationship in Pune, India, the book has earned plaudits for Doshi’s refusal to sugarcoat her protagonist, making her challenging to like. "I wanted to push boundaries," she has said. "If that ends up feeling destabilizing for the reader, that’s okay." Born in New Jersey, Avni Doshi moved to India, after completing an MA in London, to curate, and write about, South Asian contemporary art. It was there in 2012 that she wrote what would become the first draft of Burnt Sugar, winning the Tibor Jones South Asia prize for an unpublished manuscript and, with it, an agent. Check out draft number 8, which has just been published stateside by The Overlook Press, available here. Below are Avni Doshi's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Avni Doshi'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
Light Years

James Salter

This novel, about the slow disintegration of a marriage, is beautifully and delicately handled. The characters are unforgettable - glamorous and deeply flawed. I always feel I am learning how to write when I read Salter. His prose is masterful.

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2
A Spy in the House of Love

Anaïs Nin

There is something intimate about Anais Nin’s writing that pulls me in. I love this story about a woman on a path of sexual (and self) exploration. I had never heard of moon bathing until I read this novel. Now I do it every month.

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3
The Vegetarian

Han Kang

A woman stops eating meat in an attempt to become more vegetal. It sounded simple enough, but this book triggered me so intensely that I almost didn’t like it. The exploration of violence, shame and escapism completely destabilized me. I returned to it later because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Complex and deeply subversive.

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4
A Heart So White

Javier Marías

I had to read the first sentence of this novel three times to try and unpack what was going on. And from there, it just rose in intensity. I experience something visceral when I read Marias. He clearly understands how language moves through the body.

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5
SS Proleterka

Fleur Jaeggy

I had never heard of Fleur Jaeggy until last year, and now I can’t get enough of her. This book is about 100 pages long, and as polished as a diamond. I read it in one sitting, and was breathless by the end. A young girl remembers a cruise she took with her now deceased father, and the narrative switches between third and first person to create a ...

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6
Mottled Dawn

Saadat Hasan Manto

I read Manto’s short stories as an art history student, when I was thinking about violence in art inspired by Partition. The story of Toba Tek Singh always sticks out in my mind, about a man who dies on that narrow stretch of land between the two nations. I have since returned to his stories, and am always struck by the grim humor that peeks thro ...

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7
Loitering with Intent

Muriel Spark

I know everyone loves The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but Loitering with Intent is my favorite Muriel Spark novel. Her protagonist, Fleur Talbot, is the kind of writer I would love to be. Courageous and inventive. In this book, Spark is at her playful best, toying with the idea that life imitates art – and the results are hilarious.

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8
Swimming Home

Deborah Levy

A friend of mine introduced me to Deborah Levy while we were doing a fellowship in the UK. The novel has a surreal quality, like looking through the surface of water. In Levy’s deft hands, anxiety spreads through the pages of the novel, and everyone is susceptible. Characters that once seemed intact begin to unravel.

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9
One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This book has probably influenced me more than any other work of fiction that I have read. I came to it by accident, on my aunt’s bookshelf, and I could see that even though the book was old, it had never been opened. Marquez led me to my own preoccupation with memory, which has informed almost all of my creative writing so far.

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10
On Beauty

Zadie Smith

I had already read and loved Howard’s End, and when I finally came to Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, it felt like a revelation. How could a book be at once comfortingly familiar and completely new? This meditation on race, class and family is something I return to again and again.

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LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Samantha Power's Top Ten Books

Watching Chinese tanks crush democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 was something of a baptism of fire for the young Samantha Power, who switched her focus from sports journalism to foreign affairs as a result. A few years later found herself in Bosnia as a 23-year old freelancer watching in horror as the international community failed to figure out a response to the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims (she once ran the Boston marathon wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “Remember Srebrenica – 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys murdered”). Recognizing the limitations of journalism, she enrolled at Harvard Law School with the vague idea that she would find a path to the Hague to prosecute war criminals. Instead she wrote a Pulitzer-winning book, A Problem from Hell, charting the failures of successive U.S. administrations to respond adequately to genocide such as the one in Rwanda. From there it was a short hop from being hired as a foreign policy consultant by the young Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, to her elevation to US ambassador to the United Nations. In her new memoir, The Education of an Idealist (published in paperback on January 26) she goes on the record with her deep frustration at the Obama administration’s failure to intervene in Syria after UN inspectors confirmed the use of sarin gas by President Bashar al-Assad. She also writes about failing to persuade the administration to recognize the 1915 massacre of Armenians as a genocide. In January 2021, her rigorous commitment to human rights was rewarded by Joe Biden, who announced Power as his nomination to head the U.S. Agency for International Development. Below are Samantha Power's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Samantha Power'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

Achebe’s debut novel from 1958 tells the story of a successful warrior named Okonkwo, who tries to defend his tribe’s traditions after the arrival of Christian missionaries and British colonists. As two very different worlds collide, it is the complex, richly-drawn characters who leave their mark.

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2
The Long Loneliness

Dorothy Day

A bohemian anarchist turned devout Catholic, Day launched the Catholic Worker movement during the Great Depression. She lived her belief that the most vulnerable among us are made in the image of God and worthy of love. Day tells the story of her spiritual journey in this autobiography, but also writes revealingly about the challenges of aspiring t ...

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3
Selected Stories

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

Among the many miraculous contemporary Irish short-story writers one could choose from, the lesser known Éilís Ní Dhuibhne stands out to me. She writes with striking originality and economy, her characters springing from the page into our own lives.

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4
Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

“I am an invisible man,” Ellison writes, “When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” As a Black man in America, Ellison’s narrator grapples not only with racism and exclusion, but ubiquitous moral blindness about the enduring legacies of ...

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5
No Ordinary Time

Dorothy Kearns Goodwin

If I ever need a reminder of the resilience of Americans in times of crisis, I dip back into No Ordinary Time. Aided by his partnership with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR proved masterful in rallying an isolationist country ravaged by the Depression—offering profound insights for our divided present.

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6
Hiroshima

John Hersey

Ever since high school, when I first read Hersey’s magisterial portraits of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped by the US on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, their experiences have remained etched in my consciousness. Published just a year after the bombing, Hersey shows how painstaking reporting can bridge vast geographical and experiential ...

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7
Thinking Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

The Nobel Prize winning psychologist whose insights about human behavior have helped revolutionize the field of economics and the practice of public policy pulls together a lifetime of insights in this masterpiece. After reading Kahneman, one’s thinking about oneself—and one’s thinking about thinking—is permanently altered.

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8
Bernard Malamud: The Complete Stories

Bernard Malamud

The Brooklyn-born son of Russian immigrants, Malamud is a noticer who brings remarkably fresh eyes to the big and the small happenings around him in America. I have yet to come across a better encapsulation of the longing for dignity and agency that lives in every human heart than his harrowing “The German Refugee,” included in this collection.

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9
The Tender Bar

J.R. Moehringer

Recommended to me by the late, great journalist David Halberstam, Moehringer shows us how the corner bar—and the men who populate it—answers a young boy’s cravings for a father. A soulful, at times hilarious, and poignant account of the longing for belonging in us all.

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10
We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria

Wendy Pearlman

The brilliance of this book comes from the fact that Pearlman listened. She sat down, tape-recorder in hand, with hundreds of Syrians—teachers, artists, doctors, soldiers, hipsters, parents and children—and collected their first-person testimonies of tyranny and fear, protest and hope. I incorporate the book into my classes, and students feel a ...

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LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Misty Copeland's Top Ten Books

Misty Copeland, perhaps one of the most iconic ballerinas of all time, didn’t start dancing until she was 13, ancient in ballet terms. Growing up among difficult circumstances in California -- her life story captured in her 2017 memoir Life In Motion -- Copeland didn’t see too many faces like hers among the ranks of the corps de ballet. Nevertheless, she persisted and in 2015 was named the first African-American principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater. “My entire career has been devoted to inclusion, making all people feel welcome in spaces like ballet that hadn't felt open or promising to them in the past,” she says. To that end, in 2020, she turned her story into a children’s book, the New York Times best-selling Bunheads. Along the way, Copeland steeped herself in the world of children’s literature.“Each of these books speaks to the spirit of inclusion and the celebration of diversity, told through the lenses of truly dynamic characters and voices. I hope that as you delve into each book's pages, you'll come away with a renewed appreciation for the humanity in us all." Below are Misty Copeland's favorite children's books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Misty Copeland'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
Dreamers

Yuyi Morales

In 1994, Yuyi Morales travelled to the United states from her native Mexico with her infant son. This is the story she tells in lyrical verse in this brightly illustrated and deeply felt children’s book. More an illustrated memoir than traditional children’s book, it is nonetheless accessible to all ages and inspiring as well.

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2
Peg + Cat: The Pizza Problem

Jennifer Oxley and Billy Aronson

The stars of the Emmy Award-winning cartoon Peg and Cat (Peg is a human; Cat is a cat) learn fractions via pizza pie in this fun and engaging way to teach kids math and...a love for pizza.

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3
The Snowy Day

Ezra Jack Keats

Keats’ wonderful 1962 story is a true classic I remember from growing up. I was -- and continue to be -- drawn to both the simplicity of the story (a boy, Peter, takes a walk in the snow) and the, at the time rare, representation of someone whose skin color is like my own. Nearly sixty years after it was first published, I still find the book bea ...

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4
Julián is a Mermaid

Jessica Love

This colorful story of a boy who wants to dress as a mermaid for Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade blew me away. With stunningly vivid artwork, spare text and characters you can’t help but love, the story warms my heart every time I read it. Its message -- that those who love you will love you for who you are -- can never be heard too often.

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5
Sulwe

Lupita Nyong'o Illustrations by Vashti Harrison

From the opening line, “Sulwe was born the color of midnight,” Nyong’o’s story is a beautiful and encouraging one for young readers who might need an extra assurance that they are perfect just as they are. The narrative tackles colorism in a frank way as the young hero Sulwe struggles with her own skin tone. The message resonates with many ...

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6
The Proudest Blue: A Story of Hijab and Family

Ibtihaj Muhammed Illustrations by Hatem Aly

What I love about Olympic gold medalist Ibtihaj Muhammad’s debut children’s book is how it deftly shows -- not tells -- that difference doesn’t have to be scary. The book follows the first day of school for the sisters Fazia and Asiya. It is Asiya’s first day wearing a hijab and she is enormously proud. But, as the girls quickly find, her h ...

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7
Hair Love

by Matthew A. Cherry Illustrations by Vashti Harrison

Another powerful story illustrated by Vashti Harrison, the artist behind Sulwe, and Matthew A. Cherry, who also made the film Hair Love on which this book is based, this is an incredibly powerful depiction of the kind of father-daughter relationship that can be so impactful in a young girl's life. His unconditional love for his daughter supersedes ...

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8
Chocolate Me!

Taye Diggs

Taye Diggs’ story focuses on how a trio of white boys treat their erstwhile friend, whose skin is, as the title suggests, chocolate. Diggs proves himself adept both at crafting a nuanced resonant story about the hurt and pain even seemingly innocent remarks cause as well as demonstrating a mastery of language. The rhymes burst from the pages, as ...

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9
All Are Welcome

Alexandra Penfold Illustrations by Suzanne Kaufman

Penfold’s story is a somewhat more aspirational version of Muhammed’s The Proudest Blue. In Penfold’s story a diverse set of children move through their day awash in inclusivity and open-mindedness. Brightly illustrated, the story zips along in tight rhyme with the title -- all are welcome here -- serving as a comforting refrain. For example, ...

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10
Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story

Kevin Noble Maillard

Kevin Noble Maillard is a Professor of Law at Syracuse University, a member of the Seminole Nation and the author of this heart-warming story that explores Native American foodways. Fry bread, a traditional recipe that is as simple and delicious as it sounds, is made by members of an intergenerational family. What I really love as well is the back ...

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LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Maaza Mengiste's Top Ten Books

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of the Booker shortlisted-novel, The Shadow King, set during Italys' invasion of Ethiopia. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books, and her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Granta, among other journals. She is also the editor of Addis Ababa Noir (Akashic Books), which features short stories from Ethiopian writers around the world. "When I was young, all of Ethiopian history came to me through oral storytelling," she told Washington Square Review. "I understood the country through the voices of people that I knew." Thanks to Mengiste's work, that history might now find the wider audience it deserves. Below are Maaza Mengiste's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Maaza Mengiste'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Saidiya Hartman

I am fascinated by what old photographs can tell us about their subjects and photographers, and Saidiya Hartman’s book blew me away from the first page. She brings Black women and girls to life in a way that is deeply empathetic and fiercely intelligent. I’m enthralled by her gift for combining historical research with evocative imaginative lea ...

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2
The Book of Daniel

E. L. Doctorow

I no longer remember how many times I’ve read this, but each time, the sentences jump off the page, electrifyingly charged. Based on the real-life trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg during the McCarthy era, the novel is told through Daniel Isaacson, an angry young man trying to piece together the truth about his parents, executed d ...

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3
The Seven Necessary Sins of Women & Girls

Mona Eltahawy

Who says that girls should be seen and not heard? What’s wrong with ambition in a woman? Mona Eltahawy’s book is a clarion call for an uprising against patriarchy, giving the middle finger to those “seven sins” that girls have been taught they should never do or be: angry, ambitious, powerful, etc. It is as piercingly intelligent as it is u ...

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4
Visitation

Jenny Erpenbeck

Everyone who knows me knows how much I love and admire this transcendent book. I often like to say that the main character is a house. But it is also history, and how it unfolds as one tenant after the other calls this house a home. And it is also one character who appears through out, who barely utters a word. Erpenbeck’s language: lyrical and b ...

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5
The Moor’s Account

Laila Lalami

Every time I pick up this book, I wonder how Laila Lalami created the magic that she did in this book. Her rendering of Mustafa al-Zamori’s voice reads pitch-perfect. The historical details are astonishing for their precision and accuracy. This is a breathtaking work of the imagination. And I’m proud to call Laila Lalami my friend. We met befor ...

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6
Trieste

Dasa Drndic

Drndic passed away not long ago, and it is only now that she is getting the attention she deserves. I met her several years ago, after reading this book, and I was profoundly impacted by both experiences. Set in Trieste during the Nazi occupation of Italy, Drndic finds a way to meld historical documents, photographs, and fiction to create something ...

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7
Che: A Revolutionary Life

Jon Lee Anderson

I read this book slowly over the course of one summer; I didn’t want it to end. It changed how I imagined revolutions and those flawed, complex human beings we make into heroes. Anderson’s biography of Che is thorough in its research, but more than that, it’s written in such a way that you are entirely, completely immersed in the Cuban revolu ...

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8
The Conscript

Gebreyesus Hailu

This is a slender novel, but I have always felt that it holds the depth and complexity of an epic. Written in 1927 in Tigrinya, and published only in 1950, it tells the story of an ascaro, an Eritrean fighting for Italy during the campaign to colonize Libya. It is a poignant and intimate examination of war, dignity, and justice, all of it wonderful ...

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9
Afterlives

Albdulrazak Gurnah

This book drew me in slowly, gently, from the first sentence and didn’t let go until the very last. Set in the German colony of what is now Tanzania in the early 20th century, Gurnah’s novel focuses on the intimate lives of those who lived during that fraught and brutal period. The novel unwinds as the best of stories: one detail at a time, eac ...

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10
Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison

What can I say about Morrison and this book that hasn’t already been said? Reading this book was a revelation and a call to action: to pay attention, to learn more, to read more, to write it all down. I come back to this book often, each time, something new emerges. I know when I open it again, I’ll confront the same truth as every other time: ...

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LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Tsitsi Dangarembga's Top Ten Books

“The stories I want to tell are Zimbabwean stories,” the novelist and film-maker Tsitsi Dangarembga told The Independent newspaper in a recent interview. “I do find myself committed to the traumas and the struggles and the possibilities that people have here. And it makes me think about how I would waste my life if I went somewhere where I had no relevance.” Nominated for this year’s Booker Prize for her novel, This Mournable Body, Dangarembga has never been more relevant, situated at the center of a compelling, urgent cultural movement of African artists centering Africa in their work, and frequently paying the price for it. In July, just days after finding out she was on the Booker longlist, Dangarembga was arrested in Harare as part of a crackdown on anti-corruption demonstrations, sparking calls for her release from writers including Kazuo Ishiguro, Carol Ann Duffy, and Philippe Sands, the president of English PEN. The daughter of teachers at a mission school, Dangarembga spent much of her childhood in Britain, before returning to newly-independent Zimbabwe to study psychology. It was there she began to write her debut novel, Nervous Conditions, set in 1960s and ‘70s Rhodesia, eventually submitting it to The Women’s Press, the pioneering British publishing house that had published Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Nervous Conditions would go on to win the 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the 100 books which have shaped the world. The Mournable Body reunites readers with Tambudzai, the central character of Nervous Conditions and its 2006 sequel, The Book of Not, only older now, her circumstances much reduced, an embodiment of the souring of Zimbabwe’s post-colonial optimism.  Below are Tsitsi Dangarembga 's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Tsitsi Dangarembga'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
A Man Who is Not a Man

Thando Mgqolozana 

This sensitive heart-breaking novel tells the story of a young man who leaves his no good father's Cape Town abode to travel back to his mother’s Xhosa village where he is made to undergo initiation. This look from within the culture at the damage young men's initiation can do is immensely courageous and honest.

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2
An Image in a Mirror

Ijangolet S. Ogwang

This wonderfully charming coming of age novel explores national differences through the lens of teenage twin girls, one adopted in South Africa and one who remains behind with the girls mother in Uganda. In gentle, patient prose, Ogwang dissects the commonalities which override class differences amongst women in contemporary Africa.

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3
House of Stone

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Novuyo Tshuma's House of Stone tells the story of the 1980s Zimbabwean genocide of the people of Matabeleland in the south of the country with passion and irtuosity. A young man pesters his adoptive family to reveal his father's identity, until the terrible truth of his conception in an act of brutality during the ethnic cleansing is revealed.

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4
Azotus: The Kingdom

Shadreck Chikoti

A quietly compelling gem of African speculative fiction. Published in 2015 before the Covid-19 pandemic, it describes how the human need to reach out and connect triumphs in a world in which all human contact is banned or strictly controlled.

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5
The Theory of Flight

Siphiwe Ndlovu

This is the delightfully whimsical tale of a Dolly Parton look alike called Genie. The many ways Genie loses, loves and wins in her home town where the effects of a brutal genocide are still felt and where HIV devastates are described with dazzling, delicate magic.

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6
There Was a Country

Chinua Achebe 

This forthright yet carefully considered memoir dissects the 1960s Biafran secession war from Nigeria with a precision informed by service as one of the protagonists in the conflict. The international interests which contributed to the carnage are exposed in a manner which reveals how similar interests operate to devastating effect in many African ...

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7
Ways of Dying

Zakes Mda

Set in the violence of the transition from apartheid, Ways of Dying tells the story a South African city's first professional mourner, Toloki, who reunites with the flame of his youth who arrives in town from the village. Mda celebrates the healing power of tenderness and love in this triumphant, wonderfully moving work.

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8
Young Blood

Sifiso Mzob

In this fast-paced coming of age novel, talented mechanic Sipho believes he doesn't have the intelligence to do well at school and drops out. Enticed by the promise of easy money and thrills, he becomes a gang member in a Durban township. The soul of a young south African man is laid bare as Sipho finds his way forward to an honest life.

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9
The Abduction and Trial of Jestina Mukoko

Jestina Mukoko

A growing body of literature concerned with the atrocities of the Matabeleland Genocide in Zimbabwe often obscures the fact that there is little writing from within the country dealing with ZanuPF acts of terror on citizens outside Matabeleland. In this brave memoir former broadcast journalist Jestina Mukoko relates her 2008 kidnapping from her Har ...

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10
Small Country

Gaël Faye

Gaël Faye paints a disturbing picture of the way in which the 1990s genocide in Rwanda stretched its tentacles out into neighbouring Burundi, disrupting 11-year old Gabriel's privileged life in an upmarket suburb of the country's capital city.  It is a novel of the pernicious social breakdown without relief which besets too many African states.

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