Changes: A Love Story
Esi decides to divorce after enduring yet another morning’s marital rape. Though her friends and family remain baffled by her decision, Esi holds fast. When she falls in love with a married man—wealthy, and able to arrange a polygamous marriage—the modern woman finds herself trapped in a new set of problems. Witty and compelling, Aidoo’s novel, “inaugurates a new realist style in African literature.”
By: Ama Ata Aidoo
The Joys of Motherhood
Nnu Ego is a woman who gives all her energy, money and everything she has to raising her children – leaving her little time to make friends.
By: Buchi Emacheta
God’s Bits of Wood
In 1947-48 the workers on the Dakar-Niger railway staged a strike. In this vivid, timeless novel, Ousmane Sembène portrays the colour, passion, and tragedy of those formative years in the history of West Africa.
By: Ousmane Sembène
Arrow of God
Set in the Igbo heartland of eastern Nigeria, one of Africa’s best-known writers describes the conflict between old and new in its most poignant aspect: the personal struggle between father and son.
By: Chinua Achebe
The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa
These two witty and perceptive social dramas are sympathetic and honest explorations of the conflicts between the individualism of westernised culture and the social traditions of Africa. Both plays have been performed throughout the world.
By: Ama Ata Aidoo
Voices Made Night
The characters in these short stories – including the snake catcher who surrounds his lady’s house with snakes and the man who scalds his wife with boiling water for fear that she is a witch – are all caught up in a landscape defined only by its contradictions.
By: Mia Couto
Head Above Water
Buchi Emecheta’s autobiography spans the transition from a tribal childhood in the African bush to life in North London as an internationally acclaimed writer.
By: Buchi Emecheta
No Sweetness Here and Other Stories
In this collection, Ama Ata Aidoo explores postcolonial life in Ghana with honesty and humour. Tradition wrestles with new urban influences as Africans try to sort out their identity in a changing culture. True to the tradition of African storytelling, the characters come to life through their distinct voices and speech.
By: Ama Ata Aidoo
Things Fall Apart
Published in 1959, it is a story that chronicles pre-colonial life in the south-eastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of the Europeans during the late nineteenth century.
By: Chinua Achebe
The Ancestral Sacrifice
A controversial African story about the conflicts arising from the introduction of Christianity.
This results in a networked mayhem that drives the village of Asana into turmoil; a young boy’s life is lost and restores peace back to the village.
By: Kaakyire Akosomo Nyantakyi
Long Walk to Freedom
is an autobiography written by South African President Nelson Mandela. The book profiles his early life, coming of age, education and 27 years in prison. Under the apartheid government
By: Nelson Mandela
Purple Hibiscus
is a coming-of-age narrative about a young Nigerian woman who struggles to assert her identity in a patriarchal culture.
By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah
is a powerful, tender story of race and identity.
By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Half of a Yellow Sun
tells the story of the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s.
By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
So Long a Letter
This novel is in the form of a letter, written by the widowed Ramatoulaye and describing her struggle for survival. It is the winner of the Noma Award.
By: Mariama Bâ
Beyond the Horizon
A first novel by a Ghanaian woman who spent some time in Germany. It provides an account of the exploitation of women in Africa and Europe, and tells of an immigrant who, having travelled to Germany to find a paradise, finds she has been betrayed by her husband and is forced into prostitution.
By: Amma Darko
Faceless
Street life in the slums of Accra is realistically portrayed in this socially-commited, subtle novel about four educated women who are inspired by the plight of a 14-year old girl, Fofo.
By: Amma Darko
The Blinkards
is a satire that mimics the quest-to-belong nature of the Anglo Fanti
By: Kwabena Sakyi
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
The novel is generally a satirical attack on the Ghanaian society during Kwame Nkrumah’s regime and the period immediately after independence in the 1960s.
By: Ayi Kwei Armah
The Strange Man
The Strange Man is the story of old Mensa, a respected member of a village community in Ghana. A vivid description of his boyhood has many high points of which the catching of a he-goat is the most memorable.
By: Amu Djoleto
Money Galore
Money Galore is a satire that critics the corrupt state of the Ghanaian society in the immediate post-independence era.
By: Amu Djoleto