The story that you have asked me to tell you does not begin with the pitiful ugliness of Lloyd’s death. It begins on a long-ago day in August when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man.
Memory, the narrator of Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory, is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, after being sentenced for murder. As part of her appeal, her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it.
The death penalty is a mandatory sentence for murder, and Memory is, both literally and metaphorically, writing for her life. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers?
Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between past and present, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award–winning writer Petina Gappah weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate, and the treachery of memory.
Author: Petina Gappah | Print ISBN: 978-9784851848 | Format: Flapped paperback | No. of Pages: 311 | Pub. Date: 2016
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About Petina Gappah
PETINA GAPPAH is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her debut story collection, An Elegy for Easterly (2009) was short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and won the 2009 Guardian First Book Award.
| Weight | 1.5 kg |
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| Dimensions | 60.0 × 0.4 × 6.0 cm |
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Fourteen-year old Matilda Lamptey’s life changes forever when the suave and sophisticated Gold Coast lawyer Robert Bannerman decides to take her as his second wife. With her childhood snatched away, Matilda finds herself trapped in a jealous household, and finds herself constantly out-manoeuvred by Julie, Bannerman’s first-wife. At the same time, we follow the story of Audrey, the wife of the assistant to the Governor in the Colonial Office. Her life has also been turned around as she faces the tedium of daily life and the unbearable heat.
Cloth Girl is a lucid account of life in colonial West Africa, told through the eyes of two very different women. Marilyn Heward Mills’ first novel is full of expressive prose and a compelling read. The novel was shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Awards debut novel.
Author: Marilyn Heward Mills | Print ISBN: 978-9784851862 | No of Pages: 370 | Pub Date: 2008
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
A compelling story about the human spirit and resilience against the odds. Imagine This is the journal of Lola Ogunwole which she starts at the age of nine; it charts her survival from childhood to adulthood.
Born in London to Nigerian parents, Lola and her brother Adebola grow up in a temporary foster home after their mother abandons them. They are briefly reunited with their father when, in danger of losing them for good, he packs up and moves them back to Nigeria to live.
For Lola, the trauma of leaving London and settling in Lagos is soon overshadowed by separation from her father and the only constant in her life, her brother Adebola. They are both sent to live with different relatives and Lola ends up with her aunt, in a small village called Idogun where her struggle for survival begins.
Author: Sade Adeniran | Print ISBN: 978-9784894357 | No of Pages: 267 | Format: 128 x 196 | Pub Date: 2011
Àdùké lives with her grandparents in Ibadan and Grandma is her favourite person in the world. She loves when Grandma sings to her, and gives her treats from her stall. But one day, Àdùké comes home from school and can’t find Grandma anywhere! Àdùké doesn’t understand why Grandma can’t come back, but then her aunt Yímiká tells her a secret. Can she really see Grandma if she squints up at the moon?
Àdùkẹ́ ń gbé pẹ̀ lú àwọn òbí òbí rẹ̀ ní ìlú Ìbàdàn, Ìyá Àgbà ló sì fẹ́ràn jùlọ lágbàáyé.
Ó fẹ ́ràn kí Ìyá Àgbà máa kọrin fún àti bí wọ́n ṣe máa ń fun ní kókóró láti inú ìsọ̀ wọn.
Ní ọjọ́ kan, Àdùkẹ́ dé láti ilé-ìwé, ṣùgbọ́ n kò rí Ìyá Àgbà níbì kankan! Àdùkẹ́ ò mọ ìdí tí
Ìyá Àgbà ò le padà wá mọ́. Nígbà náà ni àntí Yímíká sọ àṣírí kan fún.
Ṣé lóòótọ́ ni ó lè rí Ìyá Àgbà nínú òṣùpá tí ó bá ṣe ojú rẹ̀ tínńtín?
Includes the 2021 and 2022 shortlisted AKO Caine Prize stories as well as stories from the Caine Prize workshop
A woman who carries her fate and that of her community in her hair is beguiled by the deceptive designs of Europeans out to colonise her most prized possession. A man finds happiness in the reincarnation of a lost love. A young woman risks her life for freedom through the cultural practice of a human loan scheme.
Tales of sacrifice, love, freedom, self-discovery and loss fill the pages of this larger-than-life tapestry of stories from across Africa and its diaspora. Forged in a diversity of tempers and forms, these stories range from the epistolary to the experimental, from mysteries, noirs and political thrillers to speculative fiction and futurism, and much more. In prose that moves from visual and lyrical to gritty and visceral, these writers explore fate, memory, the fragility of love and the duplicitous nature of human interactions.
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.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS 2017
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016
Dr. Morayo Da Silva, a cosmopolitan Nigerian woman, lives in San Francisco. On the cusp of seventy-five, she has a zest for life and makes the most of it through road trips in her vintage Porsche, chatting to strangers, and reminiscing about characters from her favourite novels. Then she has a fall and her independence crumbles. Without the support of family, she relies on friends and chance encounters to help keep her sanity. As Morayo recounts her story, moving seamlessly between past and present, we meet Dawud, a charming Palestinian shopkeeper, Sage, a feisty, homeless Grateful Dead devotee, and Antonio, the poet whom Morayo desired more than her ambassador husband.
A subtle story about ageing, friendship and loss, this is also a nuanced study of the erotic yearnings of an older woman.
Author: Sarah Ladipo Manyika | Print ISBN: 978-1911115045 | E-Book ISBN: 978-1911115052 | Format: Flapped paperback | No. of Pages: 126 | Pub. Date: April 2016
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