African Books

Things Fall Apart: A Novel

Chinua Achebe

Amazon Price: $6.57 List Price: $10.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Anchor Amazon Marketplace: 655 new & used starting at $3.25

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> British
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> West African

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 529 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

One of Chinua Achebe's many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart, is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism. First published in 1958, just two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, the book eschews the obvious temptation of depicting pre-colonial life as a kind of Eden. Instead, Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence. His Ibo protagonist, Okonkwo, is a self-made man. The son of a charming ne'er-do-well, he has worked all his life to overcome his father's weakness and has arrived, finally, at great prosperity and even greater reputation among his fellows in the village of Umuofia. Okonkwo is a champion wrestler, a prosperous farmer, husband to three wives and father to several children. He is also a man who exhibits flaws well-known in Greek tragedy:

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.

And yet Achebe manages to make this cruel man deeply sympathetic. He is fond of his eldest daughter, and also of Ikemefuna, a young boy sent from another village as compensation for the wrongful death of a young woman from Umuofia. He even begins to feel pride in his eldest son, in whom he has too often seen his own father. Unfortunately, a series of tragic events tests the mettle of this strong man, and it is his fear of weakness that ultimately undoes him.

Achebe does not introduce the theme of colonialism until the last 50 pages or so. By then, Okonkwo has lost everything and been driven into exile. And yet, within the traditions of his culture, he still has hope of redemption. The arrival of missionaries in Umuofia, however, followed by representatives of the colonial government, completely disrupts Ibo culture, and in the chasm between old ways and new, Okonkwo is lost forever. Deceptively simple in its prose, Things Fall Apart packs a powerful punch as Achebe holds up the ruin of one proud man to stand for the destruction of an entire culture. --Alix Wilber

Say You're One of Them

Uwem Akpan

Amazon Price: $16.31 List Price: $23.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Little, Brown and Company Amazon Marketplace: 36 new & used starting at $13.96

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Short Stories -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few readers will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.
In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa.
Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent. (2008)

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Anchor Amazon Marketplace: 52 new & used starting at $7.94

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Literary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 63 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

BEAUTIFULLY RENDERED NOVEL 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

This beautifully rendered novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes to us in breathtaking details the polarizing 1960s of Nigeria. As with Purple Hibiscus Purple Hibiscus: A Novel Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie proves yet again that her voice is not one that is easily silenced. The centers around twin sisters, Olanna and Kainene, who, along with their family, get encompassed by civil war. All I really need to say is I couldn't put this book down! From the first sentence to long after I completed it, this book stayed with me. Some call this book a love story, others it's a fictional tale based on non-fictional events, but it really is about people enduring through some of the hardest times imagined. The honesty in the language, the way Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie created the dialog, all culminate to create this haunting tale. A+

Editorial Review:

With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene. Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.

Cry, the Beloved Country (Oprah's Book Club)

Alan Paton

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Scribner Amazon Marketplace: 306 new & used starting at $0.82

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> General -> Classics
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 246 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

It's on my Top 10 5 out of 5 stars.
33 of 66 people found this review helpful.

How much can a man love his country? How much can he love his son? His God? Can justice prevail when man cannot? What is forgiveness? Redemption? Grace? To consider all these elements in one novel is not possible. Or is it?

"Cry, the Beloved Country" is all these things and more. It is forgiveness writ large. It is agape love in the doing. It is the story of two fathers, each with a son. One son is the victim of apartheid and is lost. The other is also a victim of apartheid but of the other side. He seeks to find a way to make things better, to make things right. The lost one kills the seeking one. One is African, the other is Afrikaaner, and therein lies the difference and the ultimate. This difference, this ultimate, this absolute are what drove Alan Paton in the writing of South Africa's most famous, most searing novel of the separation of races in all ways.

Absalom Kumalo's life is limited in all ways because he is black South African. Arthur Jarvis is an engineer and has all the privileges of white South Africa, yet he is keen on social justice and works to bring it to pass. What irony then that the one without kills the one seeking to bring justice. However, it is this very irony that brings their fathers to friendship, to a bonding of black man and white man.

Umfundisi is the black priest (not Catholic) of a simple, poor church in a village located near the home of the rich landowner and farmer, James Jarvis, who really does not know his son until he is dead. It is the getting to know his son that he connects with the African, and the father becomes the son in the ways of love and forgiveness. The umfundisi is one of my favorite characters in all literature I have read because of his humility and reverence.

This novel, published in 1948, remains as one, even today, apropos to race relations, to their very real potentials and actualities. Mutual respect, sincerity, forgiveness, and grace all come to the fore in this most magnificent, lyrical novel.

It would be on my Top 10 list of books I would take if marooned on the proverbial deserted island.

Editorial Review:

Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s. The book is written with such keen empathy and understanding that to read it is to share fully in the gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the dignity of mankind. Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic tale, passionately African, timeless and universal, and beyond all, selfless.

Master Harold . . . And The Boys (Penguin Plays)

Athol Fugard

Amazon Price: $9.60 List Price: $12.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin (Non-Classics) Amazon Marketplace: 88 new & used starting at $3.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> British
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> Central & South African

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

a gripping look at racism's multiple victims 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Athol Fugard, 'Master Harold' ... and the boys. New York: Penguin. 1984. Originally produced in 1982 by the Yale Repertory Theatre.

Hally does not know who he is. The single white character on stage in South African-born playright Athol Fugard's one-scene work is the friend of his mother's two black employees when they tend to St George's Park Tearoom in her absence. But he is also their 'Master Harold'-reluctantly but inevitably-when the stress of his crippled, alcoholic father's homecoming impels him into an emotional space that one simply does not share with black folks. Perhaps is it the burden of dealing with human beings on the multiple levels that racism forces upon those who resent but ultimately accede to their required roles that embitters Hally beyond redemption.

Hally doesn't know several things. He is ignorant of the nobility with which Sam and Willie have battled for his dignity over the years of service to his family. He doesn't understand that even this virtue has its limits, beyond which dignity weighs more than the possibility of continuing friendship.

Hally doesn't understand that a night of dancing at the Eastern Province Open Dancing Championships is a thing of beauty rather than of entertainment, nor the hope that is nurtured in a space where for one night people never bump into each other.

'Master Harold', the title upon which he insists at the cost of everything that matters, will never know because he cannot learn. He is a million times more the victim of the 1950's racism in the land of Fugard's birth than any black man whom, when pushed beyond his modest emotional means, he shoves around. They, at least, leave this dark, sad drama with something.

Disgrace (Penguin Essential Editions)

J. M. Coetzee

Amazon Price: $10.88 List Price: $16.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin (Non-Classics) Amazon Marketplace: 62 new & used starting at $6.75

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Literary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 335 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or anyone else's. At 52, the protagonist of Disgrace is at the end of his professional and romantic game, and seems to be deliberately courting disaster. Long a professor of modern languages at Cape Town University College, he has recently been relegated to adjunct professor of communications at the same institution, now pointedly renamed Cape Technical University:

Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: "Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other." His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Twice married and twice divorced, his magnetic looks on the wane, David rather cruelly seduces one of his students, and his conduct unbecoming is soon uncovered. In his eighth novel, J.M. Coetzee might have been content to write a searching academic satire. But in Disgrace he is intent on much more, and his art is as uncompromising as his main character, though infinitely more complex. Refusing to play the public-repentance game, David gets himself fired--a final gesture of contempt. Now, he thinks, he will write something on Byron's last years. Not empty, unread criticism, "prose measured by the yard," but a libretto. To do so, he heads for the Eastern Cape and his daughter's farm. In her mid-20s, Lucy has turned her back on city sophistications: with five hectares, she makes her living by growing flowers and produce and boarding dogs. "Nothing," David thinks, "could be more simple." But nothing, in fact, is more complicated--or, in the new South Africa, more dangerous. Far from being the refuge he has sought, little is safe in Salem. Just as David has settled into his temporary role as farmworker and unenthusiastic animal-shelter volunteer, he and Lucy are attacked by three black men. Unable to protect his daughter, David's disgrace is complete. Hers, however, is far worse.

There is much more to be explored in Coetzee's painful novel, and few consolations. It would be easy to pick up on his title and view Disgrace as a complicated working-out of personal and political shame and responsibility. But the author is concerned with his country's history, brutalities, and betrayals. Coetzee is also intent on what measure of soul and rights we allow animals. After the attack, David takes his role at the shelter more seriously, at last achieving an unlikely home and some measure of love. In Coetzee's recent Princeton lectures, The Lives of Animals, an aging novelist tells her audience that the question that occupies all lab and zoo creatures is, "Where is home, and how do I get there?" David, though still all-powerful compared to those he helps dispose of, is equally trapped, equally lost.

Disgrace is almost willfully plain. Yet it possesses its own lean, heartbreaking lyricism, most of all in its descriptions of unwanted animals. At the start of the novel, David tells his student that poetry either speaks instantly to the reader--"a flash of revelation and a flash of response"--or not at all. Coetzee's book speaks differently, its layers and sadnesses endlessly unfolding. --Kerry Fried

Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)

J. M. Coetzee

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin (Non-Classics) Amazon Marketplace: 63 new & used starting at $7.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> British
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> Central & South African

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 74 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Bleeding what is spoken with what is merely thought 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I like the way Coetzee writes dialogue -- terse with no quotation marks. Many times what is spoken and what is only thought bleed together beautifully. Many other writers use this device, Cormac McCarthy springs to mind, but I find Coetzee bar none.

Editorial Review:

These deluxe editions are packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front.

"A real literary event."--The New York Times Book Review

"A story of profound beauty, clarity and eloquence, which even at its most melodramatic holds to a biblical nobility."--Chicago Tribune Book World

Other Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
My Antonia by Willa Cather
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
White Noise by Don DeLillo

The River Between (AWS African Writers Series)

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Amazon Price: $12.55 List Price: $13.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Heinemann Amazon Marketplace: 110 new & used starting at $4.08

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Powerful Novel 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

"The River Between" tells the story of a young boy, Waiyaki, who is told by his father that he will be the savior of his village. Waiyaki's village is under the threat of integration by the white missionaries who are slowly entruding on their village. Waiyaki is to go to the mission and learn the teachings of the white man and use those teachings to help save his people. Waiyaki accepts his role as savior and feels that education is the only way to save his people.

This novel deals with complex issues, including finding a balance between accepted, traditional norms and new world education. The struggle to find a balance is the motivating factor in this novel and drives the story forward. Ngugi crafted this novel masterfully and receives tremendous praise for this work. I highly recommend this book to any who desire to read it.

Editorial Review:

...that rarity, an almost wordless love story that avoids pseudo-nobility while remaining proudly and distinctively African.
- The Guardian

Christian missionaries attempt to outlaw the female circumcision ritual and in the process create a terrible rift between the two Kikuyu communities on either side of the river. The people are torn between those who believe in Western/Christian education and the opportunities it will offer, and those who feel that only unquestioned loyalty to past traditions will save them. The growing conflict brings tragedy to a pair of young lovers who attempted to bridge the deepening chasm.

Foe: A Novel (King Penguin)

J. M. Coetzee

Amazon Price: $11.20 List Price: $14.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin (Non-Classics) Amazon Marketplace: 67 new & used starting at $6.50

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> British
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> Central & South African

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

At the Coalface of Postmodernism 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Foe "establishes itself as a prior, more original text" (Krupat 1992:9) to Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. The primary difference is that, in Coetzee's "prior" text, a young woman, Susan Barton, is washed ashore on Crusoe's island following a mutiny. She becomes the real narrator of the story -- and the story she tells is radically different to that which the original Robinson Crusoe narrates. Not only that, but her man of Letters, Foe, finally takes her story and writes her out of it, giving it shape as the present Robinson Crusoe. I shall offer my own, original interpretation of the book.

The first section may be autobiographical -- perhaps charting the author's inner journey from modernism to postmodernism. It describes the island, windswept and desolate -- unlike Defoe's original rich setting. Barton is a "livewire" who is concerned that Cruso has "narrowed his horizon". She is concerned about his "indifference to salvation". However, Cruso is quite content to lose himself "in the contemplation of the wastes of water and sky" -- rather than constructing doubtful meanings for the past, present, or future.

The second section enters into many of the problems of narrative and history. It takes place after Barton's rescue and return to England. Cruso, unable to bear the loss of his island, dies on the return journey. Barton seeks a publisher for her story (Foe), and corresponds with him. But Barton's mind is beset with problems as to how, or even whether, her story should be told. Is the story important after all? Whose story should be told? Is she distorting its content? What should she do with Friday, who is unable to speak? In fact, even when she gets into his clothes, she is unable to understand him.

The third section apparently contemplates theories of truth. Bearing in mind J.M. Coetzee's training as a computer scientist and linguist, I shall draw on the structure of computer languages. "The trick I have learned," says Foe, "is to plant a sign or marker in the ground" (this might refer to the main program). "I shall have something to return to" (one returns to the main program after a subroutine). "The more often I come back to the mark . . . the more I am heartened." The implication is, perhaps, that a life ultimately becomes its own meaning.

The fourth and final part of the novel is a short one, and may represent an attempt to paint reality beyond words and reason. There is a confusion of dream-like imagery. Barton says that God "wrote a Word so long that we have yet to come to the end of it." That is, it would seem impossible to confine truth to words or narrative, or to any enclosed system of meaning. In the closing scene, "a slow stream" comes from the mute Friday. "It runs northward and southward, to the ends of the earth" -- perhaps implying that the inflence of truth is inevitable, regardless of what narration may do to it.

The novel has been described as "an archetypal postmodern novel". In fact it takes one to the "coalface" of postmodernism. It leads one carefully through each of the many deconstructing questions about meaning. This is no textbook on postmodernism, nor even a representation of the same. This is to observe a postmodernist at work, and this makes the book unique.

Krupat, Arnold. Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature, 1992. Berkeley: University of California Press.

The Lives of Animals (The University Center for Human Values Series)

J. M. Coetzee

Amazon Price: $12.89 List Price: $18.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Princeton University Press Amazon Marketplace: 37 new & used starting at $10.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Literary

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world.

Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority.

At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target.

Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play.

As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation.