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In a world of exhausting nine-to-fives, weekends are often our only opportunities to relax and indulge in some favourite pastimes. It is not unusual to find dedicated readers blocking their weekends in order to enjoy a good book they’ve been meaning to read all week!
In our latest book recommendation, we have compiled a list of seven books to escape with on your weekend getaway. From a moving African saga to the fictional autobiography of the first African to explore America, the books on this list will shoot you right out of your present reality into intriguing new worlds, making your weekend getaway as exciting and full of adventures as possible!
Read our recommendations below.
dream count
author: chimamanda ngozi adichie
Genre: fiction
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s most recent novel after a twelve-year hiatus, she follows the lives of four women as they try and make space for themselves in Nigeria and America.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Chiamaka, a travel writer based in America, begins to reminisce about her past love affairs, the choices she made, and the regrets she has. Her best friend Zikora is a successful lawyer who, suddenly broken-hearted, seeks the help of the last person she thought she could ever need.
Then there is Omelogor, Chiamaka’s cousin, a ‘financial powerhouse in Nigeria’. Bold and outspoken, Omelogor always thought she knew herself, until recent events make her begin to doubt just how well. Finally, Kadiatou is Chiamaka’s housekeeper, a migrant determined to give her daughter a good life in America, until a sexual assault allegation threatens everything.
In this novel, Adichie explores the nature of love, of happiness, of honesty and self-knowledge, giving ‘unflinching observations on the human heart.’
segu
AUTHOR: maryse Condé
GENRE: fiction
Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé’s Segu is an African saga published in 1984 as the first of a duology. Set in Segu, a great kingdom part of present-day Mali, it explores the impact of foreign influences (such as Islam, Christianity, colonization, and the slave trade) on Africa.
It follows the lives of the four sons of a nobleman called Dousika Traore, the most trusted advisor to the king, in an era of fast and lasting change sweeping through the African continent. Each son takes a different path in life, with the eldest, Tiekoro, adopting Islam; Naba being sold into slavery in Brazil; and the youngest son Malobali joining a group of mercenaries.
The novel details the lives and experiences of each son, as well as the changing reality of the African continent, in what many have described as a great African novel.
desertion
editOR: abdulrazak gurnah
GENRE: fiction
Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2005 novel Desertion has been described as an ‘absorbing novel about abandonment and loss’. It tells two interconnected stories, following the aftermath of the mysterious arrival of an Englishman in a small village in Colonial Kenya.
In the first story, set in 1899, Hassanali, a shopkeeper, stumbles on an almost lifeless white man, a traveller and orientalist named Pearce. He takes Pearce into his home, where he treats him, and where Pearce meets Hassanali’s sister, Rehana, with whom he immediately falls in love. This scandalous love will have serious consequences which reverberate several decades later, in the 1950s Zanzibar, where the second story is set.
In the second story, we meet Rashid, the novel’s narrator in all but the last chapter, and his family, including his elder brother Amin who falls in love with a beautiful woman named Jamila. Jamila is the granddaughter of Rehana and Pearce, a couple whose scandalous love is widely known and condemned. A divorced woman from a disreputable family, Jamila is far from the acceptable choice of partner for Amin, but the two begin a secret relationship doomed to a terrible ending.
Cassava Republic Press is proud to announce the launch of their inaugural $20,000 Global Black Women’s Non-Fiction Manuscript Prize dedicated to exceptional works by Black women. Deadline: 30th June 2024. Learn more here.
the moor’s account
AUTHOR: laila lalami
GENRE: fiction
In 1527, the Narváez expedition, a Spanish expedition that aimed to establish colonial settlements in Florida, set out from Cuba. Led by the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez, it had about 600 people on board, including the slave Mustafa Azemmouri, called Estebanico. By 1536, when the expedition reached Mexico City, there were only four members left, including Estebanico.
The Moor’s Account is a fictional memoir of Estebanico, who is regarded as the first African to explore America. Estebanico is taken on the expedition by his master, the Spanish nobleman Andrés Dorantes de Carranza. They landed in the Tampa Bay region of Florida and decide to continue inland on foot. On their journey, they face several challenges, such as attacks by indigenous tribes, starvation, disease, and in-group quarrels, so that only a year later, there are only four members left.
Lalami presents Estebanico’s story to the reader in his own voice, in the style of sixteenth-century Arabic travelogues.
death of the author
Author: nnedi okorafor
Genre: fiction
Death of the Author is Nnedi Okorafor’s latest book, featuring a novel within a novel. It follows Zelu, a Nigerian-American aspiring author who is suddenly fired from her job as an associate professor of creative writing around the same time she receives a rejection for her manuscript. Following this, Zelu decides to finally sit down and write the novel she truly wants to write, a book that defies the rules. What she ends up with is a sci-fi novel about robots in a post-human world, which immediately becomes a bestseller.
Okorafor’s novel alternates between Zelu’s story and the story of the robot characters in her book. Both plots come together to illustrate the author’s important concern: how to overcome shame and embrace self-acceptance.
the famished road
AUTHOR: ben okri
GENRE: fiction
Published in 1991, The Famished Road is Ben Okri’s modern classic about a spirit child growing up in an unnamed African country. It is the first book in a trilogy, clinching the 1991 Booker Prize for Fiction.
Azaro, an abiku, or spirit child, is born to a severely economically challenged family in the ghetto of an unnamed African country. As an Abiku, he has made a pact with his spirit siblings to return to the world of spirits just after his birth, but Azaro quickly comes to love his parents and becomes reluctant to leave them. This causes his spirit siblings to constantly harass him and try to bring him back to the spirit world. Azaro navigates this harassment in a mortal world filled with tension, as two political parties prepare for elections by trying to bribe and force citizens to vote for them. Compared to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Famished Road has been described as ‘a modern classic that reveals the tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits.’
Season of migration to the north
editORs: tayeb salih
GENRE: fiction
Sudanese author Tayeb Salih is one of the legendary figures in African literature. His 1966 novel, Season of Migration to the North, quickly became a classic of postcolonial literature upon its release, exploring the history and impact of British colonialism on Sudan and the larger African continent.
Set in the 1960s, the story is told by an unnamed narrator who, after studying in Europe for many years, returns to his little village in Sudan. There, he meets Mustafa Sa’eed, a ‘child of British colonialism and fruit of colonial education’, who appears unimpressed with his own achievements. Sa’eed tells the narrator about his experiences with British women in Europe. Sa’eed had been with several British women, who were attracted to him as a result of their Orientalist fantasies. All the relationships ended with the women’s deaths, with three women committing suicide and the last woman being murdered by Sa’eed. He is tried in England and serves his time in jail before returning to Sudan to live out the rest of his life.
This narrative forms the centre of the novel, giving an analysis of the reality of desire between black men and white women. For this reason, it has been likened to Frantz Fanon’s important book, Black Skin, White Masks.