8 Books By Nigerian Writers You Should Read This Month

We have put together a list of eight books from different Nigerian writers, to serve as a reading guide to the bookworms out there, this month. So yours is the devouring to do!

Enjoy!

1. Born on a Tuesday by Elnathan John

Dantala lives in Bayan Layi, Nigeria and studies in a Sufi Quranic school. By chance he meets gang leader Banda, a nominal Muslim. Dantala is thrust into a world with fluid rules and casual violence. In the aftermath of presidential elections he runs away and ends up living in a Salafi mosque. Slowly and through the hurdles of adolescence, he embraces Salafism as preached by his new benefactor, Sheikh Jamal. Dantala falls in love with Sheikh’s daughter, Aisha, and tries to court her within the acceptable limits of a conservative setting. All the while, Sheikh struggles to deal with growing jihadist extremism within his own ranks. This novel won the 2017 Betty Trask Award. It was shortlisted for the 2016 NLNG Prize for Literature, as well as the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

2. Nights of the Creaking Bed – by Toni Kan
Nights of the Creaking Bed is full of colourful characters involved in affecting dramas: a girl who is rejected in love because she has three brothers to look after; a middle aged housewife who finds love again but has an impossible decision to make; a young man who can’t get the image of his naked, beautiful mother out of his mind; a child so poor he has to hawk onions on Christmas day – and many others. Some, initially full of hope, find their lives blighted by the cruelty of others, or by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or by just not knowing the “right” people.

3. An Orchestra of Minorities – by Chigozie Obioma
With this remarkable and almost biblical parable set in the Abacha years of 1990s Nigeria, Chigozie Obioma announces his presence as a powerful new voice in Nigerian fiction.

4. Daughters Who Walk This Path – by Yejide Kilanko
Spirited and intelligent, Morayo grows up surrounded by school friends and family in Ibadan. There is Eniayo, her adoring little sister – for whose sake their middle-class parents fight stigmatising superstition – and a large extended family of cousins and aunts who sometimes make Morayo’s home their own. A shameful secret forced upon her by Bros T, her cousin, thrusts Morayo into a web of oppressive silence woven by the adults around her. Morayo must learn to fiercely protect herself and her sister as young women growing up in a complex and politically charged country.

5. When We Speak of Nothing – by Olumide Popoola
When We Speak of Nothing launches a powerful new talent. The stream of consciousness prose, peppered with contemporary slang, captures what it means to be young, black and queer in London. If grime music were a novel, it would be this.

6. Inside I Am Just Like You – by Seye Kuyinu
“Inside I Am Just Like You,” tries to prove in verse form and short stories how similar we are- painting in words the different emotions we share as humans.

7. Foreign Gods, Inc. – by Okey Ndibe
From a disciple of the late Chinua Achebe comes a masterful and universally acclaimed novel. A meditation on the dreams, promises and frustrations of the immigrant life in America; the nature and impact of religious conflicts; an examination of the ways in which modern culture creates or heightens infatuation with the “exotic,” including the desire to own strange objects and hanker after ineffable illusions; and an exploration of the shifting nature of memory, Foreign Gods is a brilliant work of fiction that illuminates our globally interconnected world like no other.

8. Freshwater – by Akwaeke Emezi
Ada has always been unusual. Her parents prayed her into existence, but something must have gone awry. Their troubled child begins to develop separate selves and is prone to fits of anger and grief.When Ada grows up and heads to college in America, a traumatic event crystallises the selves into something more powerful. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind, these ‘alters’ – now protective, now hedonistic – take control, shifting her life in a dangerous direction.