I recently read Paulina Chiziane's The First Wife (she's from Mozambique), and found it so memorable that I want to do a little exploring now. And I want to know two things: 1) which is the best book by each Nobel-Prize-winning African author (Soyinka, Coetzee, Lessing, Gordimer, Gurnah, Mahfouz) and 2) what's your favorite novel by an African author? THANK YOU!!
by tolkienfan2759
5 Comments
Only have an answer for #2) The Civilization, by K.M. McKenzie. YA adventure.
For Gordimer, probably July’s People.
I’ve never read a Mahfouz I didn’t enjoy. The writing is wonderful.
And don’t sleep on Ben Okri, The Famished Road is one of my favorite books of all time.
A novella that has been haunting me ever since I read it many years ago is Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero. [El Saadawi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nawal_El_Saadawi) was a remarkable woman, a physician and a feminist, and she met the woman she fictionalized for this novella while visiting a women’s prison.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
I enjoyed:
Small Country by Gael Faye (about Burundi and his childhood there);
When The Ground is Hard by Mailla Nunn (a YA book about a friendship between two girls ar a boarding school in Eswatini)
The Moor’s Account by Laila Lailami (historical fiction from the POV of an enslaved Moroccan man in the party of an aspiring Spanish conquistador)
River Spirit by Leila Aboulela (historical fiction about the Mahdist Wars, a civil war and colonial clash in Sudan in the late 1800s)
Radiance of Tomorrow by Ishmael Beah (about people struggling to rebuild their lives as Sierra Leone struggles to recover from civil war and deals with both internal corruption and amoral Western opportunists)
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (a multifamily multigenerational saga centered around Zambia and its journey from a colony to an independent nation)
Mount Pleasant by Patrice Ngang was challenging for me. I’ve never read anything so deeply non-linear in my life. I ultimately would say that I like and recommend the book, and that if you’re looking for something different from the norm, you’ll definitely find it in this book. To simplify, it tells the story of the last sultan of Cameroon and the birth of the modern nation. That’s a bit like saying Pulp Fiction is about a robbery at a diner, though. It was 265 pages long and took me about three weeks to finish!