A truly multilingual volume of poetry that captures the times, legends and spaces of the city in the mellifluous tone of a court raconteur; Ilorin is the rational hybrid of cultures, its praise-song steeped in the invocation and evocation of indigenous,oriental and western traditions. Written in English, Yoruba and Hausa, the poems are carefully stringed in short spurts of epical quality.
BOXED CASE SERIES OF THE CLASSIC TITLES – AKE, IBADAN, ISARA AND THE MAN DIED BY THE NOBEL LAURETE WOLE SOYINKA. A COLLECTOR’S ITEM.
In the late 1960’s, Adah, a spirited and resourceful woman manages to move her family to London. Seeking an independent life for herself and her children she encounters racism and hard truths about being a new citizen.
From a suspiciously cheap Hell’s Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship Ekong Udousoro is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime: to learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicenter. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly―callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile neighbors, and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food.
Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong’s people were a minority of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekong’s life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. The great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collective antagonism toward the “other” consumes Ekong’s daily life. Yet in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese and Latino and African American, and in bonding with his true allies at work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there is still hope in sharing our stories.
Akpan’s prose melds humor, tenderness, and pain to explore the myriad ways that tribalisms define life everywhere, from the villages of Nigeria to the villages within New York City. New York, My Village is a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the life-sustaining power of community across borders and across boroughs.
As first son and graduate, Kingsley Ibe has a load of responsibilities resting on his skinny shoulders. But times are bad in Nigeria, and life is hard. Unable to find work, Kingsley cannot take on the duty of training his younger siblings, nor can he provide his parents with financial peace in their retirement. And then there is Ola his girlfriend, the sugar in Kingsley’s tea. It does not seem to matter that he loves her deeply; he cannot afford her bride price.
But when Kingsley’s father falls sick, he becomes desperate to live up to his responsibilities. So he travels to Aba, to his wealthy uncle, ‘Cash Daddy’.
Under the avuncular wing of ‘Cash Daddy’, Kingsley is catapulted into the fast-money world of email scamming where he discovers a profitable talent for persuasive storytelling. But, as the stakes grow higher and Cash Daddy grows more ambitious, Kingsley begins to realise he is in way over his head and that, even in Nigeria, nothing comes for free . . .
I Do Not Come to You by Chance, a book which the author deems an idea that came before the novel, is one that through the Protagonist, Kingsley, attempts to explore the journey from good to bad and the blurred lines in between.
The volume seeks to make a substantive contribution to contemporary global transformation debates in an era of “Rhodes Must Fall” and “Black Lives Matter.” It also aims to contribute to transforming fossilised Eurocentric curricula which have insisted for centuries that “dead white men” continue to occupy the central position in global epistemologies on almost every subject under the sun.
Pastor Nicholas Adejuwon and his beautiful wife Nkechi run Rivers of Joy Church, the rave of the moment Lagos megachurch. When Nkechi decides to investigate her husband’s indiscretion, it was merely to satisfy her curiosity. What she unravels is a web of bruising secrets that run deeper than she could have ever imagined, threatening her reality as she knew it.
This is a novel about power and the people who inordinately thirst for it. It explores those blurred lines between truth and falsehood, spirituality and hypocrisy and the ironies that fate deals us at the end of our desperate quests in life.
Afonja The Fall is the second book in the Afonja Trilogy. Historical fiction, set in the final days of the collapse of the Oyo Empire.
It continues the story of the titular Afonja, the generalissimo of the Oyo Empire and his clashes with the Alaafin who is nominally his lord. Ultimately, Afonja comes crashing from the heights of power he attained in The Rise and Ilorin is forever lost to the Yoruba.
The whole family gathers at Tobi’s house to celebrate some good news and Tobi chooses a special way to say well done to her big brother Dare. What did Dare do? How does Tobi surprise him? Find out in TOBI BAKES A CAKE.
TOBI BAKES A CAKE is a picture book for children aged 2 – 6.
Lagos is a city for all . . . you share this place with flesh and not-flesh, and it’s just as much their city as it is yours.
Èkó, the spirit of Lagos, and his loyal minion Tatafo weave trouble through the streets of Lagos and through the lives of the ‘vagabonds’ powering modern Nigeria: the queer, the displaced and the footloose.
With Tatafo as our guide we meet these people in the shadows. Among them are a driver for a debauched politician; a lesbian couple whose tender relationship sheds unexpected light on their experience with underground sex work; a mother who attends a secret spiritual gathering that shifts her reality. As their lives begin to intertwine—in markets and underground clubs, in churches and hotel rooms—the vagabonds are seized and challenged by the spirits who command the city. A force is drawing them all together, but for what purpose?
In her debut novel VAGABONDS! Eloghosa Osunde tackles the insidious nature of Nigerian capitalism, corruption and oppression, and offers a defiant, joyous and inventive tribute to all those for whom life itself is a form of resistance.
Dada Ade does not like her hair. So she goes to see the Good Hair Fairy in hopes of receiving some good hair. But when she gets to the Good Hair Fairy, a big surprise awaits her.
The Gods Are Not To Blame is a 1968 play and a 1971 novel by Ola Rotimi. An adaptation of the Greek classic Oedipus Rex, the story centres on Odewale, who is lured into a false sense of security, only to somehow get caught up in a somewhat consanguineous trail of events by the gods of the land.
You Must Set Forth at Dawn is an intimate chronicle of his thrilling public life, a meditation on justice and tyranny, and a mesmerizing testament to a ravaged yet hopeful land.
This is a heartwarming illustrated children’s story of a young foal who wanders away from his herd and gets tricked by a cunning hyena. Kob thinks hard, breaks free from the lair of his captor and reunites with his long lost family.
The murder of Dele Giwa remains on the infamous list of Nigeria’s unsolved murders. More than twenty-five years after Nigeria’s first ever parcel bomb ended the life of one of the country’s most colourful investigative journalists, the case has refused to be laid to rest. In Honour for Sale, Debo Basorun, with the insight of his proximity to some of the dramatis personae, examines the lurid circumstances of this controversial murder. He unearths a web of ‘intrigue and treachery, clannishness and base humanity’ of some of the men in uniform who, only recently, ran the affairs of the country.
In the fictional country of Madia, a prostitute runs into the sea and drowns. The last man who spoke to her, the ‘madman’ Bukuru, is arrested and charged with murder. In court, Bukuru, representing himself, counters the charges with bombshell allegations. He speaks of government complicity in a series of atrocities, accusing the Madian ruler of rape and murder. His startling testimony is hushed up and Bukuru is sent back to prison, where his fate is grim. When a young journalist wangles a visit to his cell, they journey through turbulent decades of history that illuminate Bukuru’s life and the nation’s.
Brave and powerful, Arrows of Rain brilliantly dramatises complex factors behind the near-collapse of a nation. It is the lyrical, resonant and propulsive first novel by one of the most exciting contemporary novelists.
