Hot cake (book) doesn’t stay long on the shelf, yeah? Yasss! Thanks to book enthusiasts who can never get enough of the written word, lol. If you’re ready to go on new adventures through the minds of your favourite Nigerian writers, then you definitely need to read these books.
Table of Contents
Title: What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
Description: A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home.
Genre: poetry collection
Title: Your Father Walks Like A Crab by Tolu Akinyemi
Description: A lot of people ‘hate’ poetry because of its usually obscure language. ‘Your Father Walks Like A Crab’ however contains poetry stripped of conformity and with a motive to portray poetry as enjoyable, especially to those people who do not normally read poetry. It is fresh, vivid, whimsical, somewhat cheeky and sprinkled with wit and humour. In a good way, this book contains the kind of poetry that you most likely haven’t read before.
Genre: poetry collection
Title: Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Description: From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes to a powerful new statement about feminism today—written as a letter to a friend.
A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie’s letter of response.
Here are fifteen invaluable suggestions–compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive–for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and s3xuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can “allow” women to have full careers,
Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of s3xual politics in the twenty-first century. It will start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.
Genre: Culture
Title: Like a Mule Bringing Ice cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika
Description: Morayo Da Silva, a cosmopolitan Nigerian woman, lives in San Francisco. Almost seventy-five, she has a zest for life and enjoys road trips in her vintage Porsche. But when Morayo has an accident, crushing her independence, she is prompted to reassess her relationships and recollect her past life and loves. A humorous, joyful read.
Genre: Novel
Title: When We Speak of Nothing by Olumide Popoola
Description: Best mates Karl and Abu are both 17 and live near Kings Cross. It’s 2011 and racial tensions are set to explode across London. Abu is infatuated with gorgeous classmate Nalini but dares not speak to her. Meanwhile, Karl is the target of the local ‘wannabe’ thugs just for being different.
When Karl finds out his father lives in Nigeria, he decides that Port Harcourt is the best place to escape the sound and fury of London, and connect with a Dad he’s never known.Karl befriends Nakale, an activist who wants to expose the ecocide in the Niger Delta to the world. Increasingly distant from happenings in London, Karl falls headlong for Nakale’s feisty cousin, Janoma.
Meanwhile, the murder of Mark Duggan triggers a full-scale riot in London. Abu finds himself caught up in its midst, leading to a tragedy that forces Karl to race back home.
Genre: Novel
Title: To Bee a Honey by Oyindamola Shoola
Description: The constituents of Oyindamola’s reality as a young black female immigrant have caused an explosion of feminist awakening in Oyin’s heart and her readers are the lucky spectators who get to watch her bedazzle us with To Bee a Honey: a scintillating work of art. Throughout the work, we see influences of other powerful women of colour such as Warsan Shire, Rupi Kaur, and Maya Angelou, albeit not with the author’s intention. We encounter a poet who does not only revel in the new-found confidence of her scribbling but also in the lush glow of her womanhood. What immediately strikes one upon perusing this work is its aesthetic beauty. This is not limited to the arresting visual images drawn up on the pages but also the arrangement of the lines; with carefully-planned alignments birthing creatively-shaped poems. A perfect example is a poem in this collection titled “The pression,” which relies more on the manner of presentation of the words to relay the message, than the actual self-contained meanings of the words themselves. The poems in To Bee a Honey are unlike what is found in many other poetry collections. They are drawings along the lines of the reader’s consciousness. “At the risk of being accused of over-proclamation, I dare say, To Bee a Honey is a welcome to the future of twenty-first-century African poetry.” – Kanyinsola Olorunnisola
Genre: poetry collection
Title: Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo
Description: Yejide and Akin have been married since they met and fell in love at university. Though many expected Akin to take several wives, he and Yejide have always agreed: polygamy is not for them. But four years into their marriage–after consulting fertility doctors and healers, trying strange teas and unlikely cures–Yejide is still not pregnant. She assumes she still has time–until her family arrives on her doorstep with a young woman they introduce as Akin’s second wife. Furious, shocked, and livid with jealousy, Yejide knows the only way to save her marriage is to get pregnant. Which, finally, she does–but at a cost far greater than she could have dared to imagine. An electrifying novel of enormous emotional power, Stay With Me asks how much we can sacrifice for the sake of the family.
Genre: Novel
Title: Funny Men Cannot Be Trusted by Tolu Akinyemi
Description: Funny Men Cannot Be Trusted’ is the witty yet poignant third instalment in the unconventional ‘Poetry for people who hate poetry’ series. It is a collection that humorously melds the trivial and the serious. It’s introduced with an exploration of the roles, foibles, and failures of men and fathers in relationships and families.
Genre: poetry collection
Title: Blind Spot by Teju Cole
Description: Here, journey through more than 150 of Cole’s full-color original photos, each accompanied by his lyrical and evocative prose, forming a multimedia diary of years of near-constant travel: from a park in Berlin to a mountain range in Switzerland, a church exterior in Lagos to a parking lot in Brooklyn; landscapes and interiors, beautiful or quotidian, that inspire Cole’s memories, fantasies, and introspections. Ships in Capri remind him of the work of writers from Homer to Edna O’Brien; a hotel room in Wannsee brings back a disturbing dream about a friend’s death; a home in Tivoli evokes a transformative period of semi-blindness, after which “the photography changed. . . . The looking changed.”
Genre: photography
Title: I Laugh At These Skinny Girls by Tolu Akinyemi
Description: Many people ‘ hate’ poetry, because they find it tedious, boring and sometimes intimidating. ‘I Laugh At These Skinny Girls’ is a refreshing and exciting approach to poetry. It is a collection of ‘Poetry for people who hate poetry’ which is poetry marinated in; simplicity, relatability, vividness and wittiness. Without any intention to ridicule complex forms of poetry, the poems in this book are written without the strictures of conformity and with a form and motive to portray poetry as enjoyable, especially to those people who would normally not read poetry. ‘I Laugh at These Tiny Girls’ is the second book in the ‘Poetry for people who hate poetry’ series.
Genre: poetry collection
You can purchase these books on Okadabooks, Amazon, Goodreads, BarnesandNoble, CassavaRepublic, PenguinRandomHouse
They are hot stuff, no bluff. Which would you read before the year wraps up?
