A young man decides to visit Nigeria after years of absence. Ahead lies the difficult journey back to the family house and all its memories; meetings with childhood friends and above all, facing up to the paradox of Nigeria, whose present is as burdened by the past as it is facing a new future.
Along the way, our narrator encounters life in Lagos. He is captivated by a woman reading on a danfo; attempts to check his email are frustrated by Yahoo boys; he is charmingly duped buying fuel. He admires the grace of an aunty, bereaved by armed robbers and is inspired by the new malls and cultural venues. The question is: should he stay or should he leave?
But before the story can even begin, he has to queue for his visa…
Every Day is for the Thief is a striking portrait of Nigeria in change. Through a series of cinematic portraits of everyday life in Lagos, Teju Cole provides a fresh approach to the returnee experience.
Author: Teju Cole | Print ISBN: 978-9780805159 | Format: Flapped paperback | No. of Pages: 130 | Pub. Date: 2007
Teju Cole is a writer and photographer currently based in New York. He has worked as a cartoonist, dishwasher, lecturer, gardener and haematology researcher. His writing has appeared in various journals in Nigeria and the US.Every Day is for the Thief is his first novel.
Find out more at Teju Cole’s website.
You may also like to read Teju Cole’s eight letters to a young writer.
| Weight | 1.5 kg |
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| Dimensions | 60.0 × 0.4 × 6.0 cm |
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For a polygamist like Baba Segi, his collection of wives and a gaggle of children are the symbol of prosperity, success and validation of his manhood. Everything runs reasonably smoothly in the patriarchal home, until wife number four intrudes on this family romance.
Bolanle, a graduate amongst the semi-literate wives, is hated from the start. Baba Segi’s glee at bagging a graduate doesn’t help matters. Worse, Bolanle’s arrival threatens to do more than simply ruffle feathers. She’s unwittingly set to expose a secret that her co-wives intend to protect, at all costs.
Lola Shoneyin’s light and ironic touch exposes not only the rotten innards of Baba Segi’s polygamous household in this cleverly plotted story; it also shows how women not educated or semi-literate, women in contemporary Nigeria can be as restricted, controlled and damaged by men – be they fathers, husbands, uncles, rapists – as they’ve never been.
Author: Lola Shoneyin | Print ISBN: 978-9784851800 | Format: 123 x 197mm | No. of Pages: 245 | Pub Date: 2010
Sex and friendship, ambition and political intrigue, secrets and betrayal will set the fate of two slaves— Jamīla and Abimelech—in this ground-breaking debut novel.
Inspired by the only existing first-person narrative of an Abyssinian slave in Iran, Jamīla Habashī, In the Palace of Flowers recreates the opulent Persian royal court of the Qajars at the end of the nineteenth century. This is a precarious time of growing public dissent, foreign interference from the Russians and British, and the problem of an aging ruler and his unsuitable heir.
Torn away from their families, Jamila, a concubine, and Abimelech, a eunuch, now serve at the whims of the royal family, only too aware of their own insignificance in the eyes of their masters. Abimelech and Jamila’s quest to take control over their lives and find meaning leads to them navigating the dangerous politics of the royal court, and to the radicals that lie beyond its walls.
Richly textured and elegantly written, at its heart In The Palace of Flowers is a novel about the fear of being forgotten.
In the early sixties, Tayo Ajayi sails to England from Nigeria to take up a scholarship at Oxford University. There he discovers a whole generation high on visions of a new and better world. He meets Vanessa Richardson, the beautiful daughter of a former colonial officer. Their story, which spans four decades, is a bittersweet tale of a brave but doomed affair and the universal desire to fall truly, madly and deeply in love.
A lyrical and moving story of unfulfilled love fraught with the weight of history, race and geography and intertwined with questions of belonging, aging, faith and family secrets. In Dependence explores the complexities of contemporary Africa, its Diaspora and its interdependence with the rest of the world.
Aminah lives an idyllic life in the village of Botu, until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that will turn her from a daydreamer into a resilient woman. Wurche, the wilful daughter of a chief, is desperate to play an important role in her father’s court at Salaga-Kpembe.
The lives of these two remarkable women converge in a tumultuous meeting that takes them from mistress and slave to unlikely allies, as Aminah and Wurche find themselves tangled in a web of desire, jealousy, political intrigue and illicit affairs. Meanwhile, infighting among Wurche’s people threatens to leave the region exposed to powers much larger than themselves.
The Hundred Wells of Salaga explores the depths of female friendship in this stirringly intimate reimagining of life in pre-colonial Ghana. This captivating novel establishes Ayesha Harruna Attah as one of the most distinctive voices of the contemporary literary scene.
Author: Ayesha Harruna Attah | Print ISBN: 978-1911115519 | E-Book ISBN: 978-1911115526 | Format: Flapped paperback | No. of Pages: 234 | Pub. Date: UK: 8th May 2018 | Pub. Date: Nigeria: 8th July 2018
Imprisoned for ten years for his rage against society, activist and retired academic Prof resolves to live a life of darkness after his release from prison. He holes up in his apartment, pushing away friends and family, and embraces his status as an urban legend in the neighbourhood until a knock at the door shakes his new existence.
His new visitor is Desire, an orphan and final year student, who has grown up idolising Prof, following a fateful encounter in her hometown of Maroko as a child. Tentatively, the two begin to form a bond, as she returns every night at 9pm to see him. However, the darkness of the room becomes a steady torment, that threatens to drive Desire away for good.
A Small Silence is an intimate and evocative debut charges us to look again at the alienating effects of trauma and the power of solitude and darkness to ignite the imagination.
On the noisy Ajayi Crowther Street in Lagos, neighbours gather to gossip, discuss noise complaints, and faithfully head to church each Sunday. But beneath the surface lies a hidden world of clandestine love affairs, hidden pregnancy, spiritual quackery and hypocrisy, that threatens to destroy the community from within.
On Ajayi Crowther Street peels back the curtains on the lives of Reverend Akpoborie and his family, to reveal a tumultuous world full of secrets and lies. His only son, Godstime, is struggling to hide his sexuality from his parents whilst his daughter Keturah must hide the truth of her pregnancy by her pastor boyfriend to preserve her and her family’s image. But it is the Reverend himself who hides the darkest secret of them all, as his wondering eye lands on Kyauta, their young live-in maid.
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