Proudly Nigerian

Andrew Aziza is an unusually smart fifteen-year-old in Kontagora, Nigeria. He lives with his fiercely protective mother, Gloria, and fantasizes obsessively about white girls-especially blondes. When he’s not in church, at school, or hanging about town with his droogs wishing to become one of “Africa’s first superheroes,” he’s contemplating the larger questions with his teacher Zahrah and his equally brilliant friend Fatima, a Hausa-Fulani girl who has feelings for him. Together they discuss mathematical theorems, Black power, and what Andy has deemed the Curse of Africa.

Sure enough, the reluctantly nicknamed Andy Africa soon falls hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on: Eileen. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. An unfamiliar man there claims, despite his mother’s denials, to be Andy’s father, and an anti-Christian mob has gathered, headed for the church. In the ensuing havoc and its aftermath, Andy is forced to reckon with his identity and desires and determine how to live on the so-called Cursed Continent.

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa announces a dazzlingly unique literary voice. Crackling with energy, this tragicomic novel provides a stunning lens into contemporary African life, the complicity of the West, and the impossible challenges of growing up in a turbulent world.

Every rise masks a deadly fall. Especially his.

Being seventeen and about to graduate high school is likely one of the best years for most teens. Not Naeto. With desiring a life contrary to his father’s plans and simmering sexual tension threatening to ruin his friendship with his best friend Zino, his life’s a twisting mass of complications.

Getting a full-board scholarship into Charleston, a top-tier dance academy in Arizona, should have smoothed things out, but complications have a way of finding Naeto.

First he meets Eloise, Charleston’s star pupil trapped with the ghost from her past, and his awakened heart yearns for nothing more than to capture hers. Then he learns the girl he loves would do anything to hold on to her past including giving up her present with him and a face from his past comes calling with plans of his own.

Expert In All Styles explores, in richly-textured stories, the complex and often painful struggles of individuals with desire, despair, and hope within the social constructs of contemporary Nigeria.

The twelve stories in the collection range in setting and tone – from the joys of a family excursion in Maiduguri in The Lake Chad Club to an American-Nigerian family’s return to Lagos in Communicable Disease.
In this gorgeously crafted debut, Echeruo interrogates the dynamics of power – from the intimacies of domestic life, to the machinations of national politics and the fervour of religion – seeking always an understanding of the human condition.

Expert In All Styles is a thoughtful, incisive collection with memorably-drawn characters whose lives are as universal as they are particular.