Happy Tuesday everyone! As it is Tuesday, it is time for a Top Ten Tuesday update. Top Ten Tuesday is an original blog meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and is currently being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.
This week’s given topic: Ten Most Recent Books I Did Not Finish
Unfortunately (or maybe not), I don’t have a book that I did not finish. You see when I was younger, I made a vow not to leave a book I started reading unread. This was a promise I carried until I became an adult. I may struggle with a book but I always ensure that I will finish it. I know many readers will disagree with this. I don’t know. Maybe my perspective will change with time. HAHA.
Given this, I have opted to feature the books that are going to be on my August reading list. In August, I will be traveling from Asia to Africa to explore the continent’s literature. The last time I hosted an African literature month was back in 2021 so I am quite excited. Moreover, I have signed up for the 12 Books by African Writers Book Challenge, a bookish challenge hosted by Nokukhanya Ntsabula a.k.a Pretty Bookish. Without more ado, here are the works of African literature I will be reading this coming August.
Title: Wahala
Author: Nikki May
Publisher: Custom House
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 371
Synopsis:
An incisive and exhilarating debut novel following three Anglo-Nigerian best friends and the lethally glamorous fourth woman who infiltrates their group – the most unforgettable girls since Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda.
RONKE wants happily ever after and 2.2 kids. She’s dating Kayode and wants him to be “the one” (perfect, like her dead father). Her friends think he’s just another in a long line of dodgy Nigerian boyfriends.
BOO has everything Ronke wants – kind husband, gorgeous child. But she’s frustrated, unfulfilled, plagued by guilt, and desperate to remember who she used to be.
SIMI is the golden one with the perfect lifestyle. No one knows she’s crippled by impostor syndrome and tempted to pack it all in each time her boss mentions her “urban vibe.” Her husband thinks they’re trying for a baby. She’s not.
When the high-flying, charismatic ISOBEL explodes into the group, it seems at first she’s bringing out the best in each woman. (She gets Simi an interview in Shanghai! Goes jogging with Boo!) But the more Isobel intervenes, the more chaos she sows, and Ronke, Simi and Boo’s close friendship begins to crack.
A sharp, modern take on friendship, ambition, culture and betrayal, Wahala (trouble) is an unforgettable novel from a brilliant new voice.
Title: A Spell of Good Things
Author: Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 332
Synopsis:
Ẹniọlá is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. Because his father has lost his job, Ẹniọlá spends his day running errands for the local tailor, collecting newspapers, begging when he must and dreaming of a big future.
Wúràọlá is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family. Now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practice, she is believed by Kúnlé, the volatile son of an ascendant politician.
When another local politician takes an interest in Ẹniọlá and sudden violence shatters a family party, Wúràọlá’s and Ẹniọlá’s lives become intertwined. In her breathtaking second novel, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ shines her light on Nigeria, its aging class divide and the shared humanity that lives in between.
Title: July’s People
Author: Nadine Gordimer
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1982 (1981)
No. of Pages: 160
Synopsis:
For years, it had been what is called a “deteriorating situation.” Now all over South Africa the cities are battlegrounds. The members of the Smales family – liberal whites – are rescued from the terror by their servant, July, who leads them to refuge in his village. What happens to the Smaleses and to July – the shifts in character and relationships – gives us an unforgettable look into the terrifying, tacit understandings and misunderstandings between blacks and whites.
Title: Palace of Desire
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Translators: William Maynard Hutchins, Lorne M. Kenny, and Olive E. Kenny
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Publishing Date: 2001 (1957)
No. of Pages: 422
Synopsis:
In this second volume of The Cairo Trilogy, the master storyteller spins a sensual, provocative tale, following the al-Jawad family into the awakening world of the 1920s, where increased freedoms prove as troubling as domination and repression once did. Like Palace Walk, Palace of Desire affords a fascinating look at a period of modern Egyptian history by lovingly and painstakingly examining the day-to-day lives of a single family.
Title: Elizabeth Costello
Author: J.M. Coetzee
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 230
Synopsis:
In 1982, J.M. Coetzee dazzled the literary world with his novel Waiting for the Barbarians. Five novels and two Booker Prizes later, Coetzee is a writer of international stature. Now, in his first work of fiction since the New York Times bestselling Disgrace, he has crafted an unusual and deeply affecting tale.
Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished and aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through an ingenious series of eight formal addresses. From an award-acceptance speech at a New England liberal arts college to a lecture on evil in Amsterdam and a sexually charged reading by the poet Robert Duncan, Coetzee draws the reader inexorably towards its astonishing conclusion.
Title: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth
Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 444
Synopsis:
The first Black winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature gives us a tour de force, his first novel in nearly half a century: a savagely satiric, gleefully irreverent, rollicking fictional meditation on how power and greed can corrupt the soul of a nation.
In an imaginary Nigeria, a cunning entrepreneur is selling body parts stolen from Dr. Menka’s hospital for use in ritualistic practices. Dr. Menka shares the grisly news with his oldest college friend, bon viveur, star engineer, and Yoruba royal, Duyole Pitan-Payne. The life of every party, Duyole is about to assume a prestigious post at the United Nations in New York, but it now seems that someone is determined that he not make it there. And neither Menka nor Duyole knows why, or how close the enemy is, or how powerful.
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is at once a literary hoot, a crafty whodunit, and a scathing indictment of political and social corruption. It is a stirring call to arms against the abuse of power from one of our fiercest political activists, who also happens to be a global literary giant.
Title: The Lodging House
Author: Khairy Shalaby
Translator: Farouk Abdel Wahab
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 426
Synopsis:
A young man’s dreams for a better future as a student in the Teachers’ Institute are shattered after he assaults one of his instructors for discriminating against him. From then on, he begins his descent into the underworld. Penniless, he seeks refuge in Wikalat Atiya, a historic but now completely run-down caravanserai that has become the home of the town’s marginal and underprivileged characters.
This award-winning novel takes on epic dimensions as the narrator escorts us on a journey to this underworld, portraying – as he sinks further into its intricate relationships – the many characters that inhabit it.
This award-winning novel takes on epic dimensions as the narrator escorts us on a journey to this underworld, portraying – as he sinks further into its intricate relationships – the many characters that inhabit it.
Title: The Fishermen
Author: Chigozie Obioma
Publisher: Little, Brown, and Company
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 295
Synopsis:
In a Nigerian town in the mid-1990s, four brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family.
Told from the point of view of nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of the four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990s Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their strict father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the ominous, forbidden nearby river, they meet a dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings.
Told from the point of view of nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of the four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990s Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their strict father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the ominous, forbidden nearby river, they meet a dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings.
With this bold debut, Chigozie Obioma emerges as one of the most original new voices of modern African literature, echoing its older generation’s masterly storytelling with a contemporary fearlessness and purpose.
Title: Paradise
Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Publisher: Bloombsury
Publishing Date: 2004
No. of Pages: 247
Synopsis:
Born in East Africa, Yusuf has few qualms about the journey he is to make. It never occurs to him to ask why he is accompanying Uncle Aziz or why the trip has been organised so suddenly, and he does not think to ask when he will be returning. But the truth is that his ‘uncle’ is a rich and powerful merchant and Yusuf has been pawned to him to pay his father’s debts. Paradise is the story of Yusuf’s coming of age against the backdrop of an Africa of myth, dreams and Biblical and Koranic tradition, growing corrupt with violence and the influence of colonialism.
Title: The Wedding of Zein
Author: Tayeb Salih
Translator: Denys Johnson-Davies
Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd
Publishing Date: 1984
No. of Pages: 120
Synopsis:
Tayeb Salih is now recognized as one of the most exceptional Arabic writers. His novel Season of Migration to the North (Arab Authors 4) has been widely acclaimed both in Arabic and in its English translation. He was born in Sudan in 1929 and studied at Khartoum and London universities. He became Head of Drama in the BBC’s Arabic Service and then went to Qatar where he is Head of the Information Services.
Kingsley Amis wrote: “What I find particularly attractive about Mr Salih’s way of writing is his attitude to the village people he describes. All of them are seen in a humourous way; the reader is invited to laugh at them, or at least to smile. And yet this humour is fundamentally kind; even at their most ridiculous, all the characters retain an essential dignity….
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 