I cannot think of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart without thinking about yams. So when one of the students in my Global Cultural Studies class mentioned yams as one of the main intrigues of the novel, I nodded and laughed. Yes. Great point! For Achebe, yams were not just a convenient plot device; they reflected the way his characters saw and understood the world. In Igbo culture, the harvest of yams is immensely symbolic; it charts the rhythm of the year, almost like a calendar, and it signifies the blessings of ancestors.
In my debut novel, This Kind of Trouble, a story that spans an entire century, I attempt to create a similar narrative motif using the Uchu river. Essentially, the river is my way of enacting what Achebe does with yams—a cultural homage that draws on an object’s spiritual and social connotations while refusing to get bogged down in anthropological explanation. This native-object symbolism is one of the many things I picked up from Achebe—a sense of cultural attunement that helps my story find historical texture without being overburdened by historical facts.
I am often drawn to these questions of tradition and lineage in craft, what T.S Elliot described as the way a writer carries in his work, the “presence of the past.” When I pick a book I love, especially a book by an African author, I want to know the ghosts of our literary elders lurking behind the pages. This is not a simple undertaking, it leads me to struggle with other questions, such as, what it means for the African novel to sing with the voice of its dead while being written in a language that has rendered its ancestors marginal to the Canon. While it’d be correct to say that I owe a lot to Hemingway and Updike—and especially to Morrison, and Marilyn Robinson—I owe much more to the golden age writers of African descent who brought their alienation and placelessness into literary form. The writers I claim here are not defined by geographic or national boundaries, since the idea of a homogenous Africa is itself a fiction. Instead, I embrace a literary archive of shared colonial histories, currents of Black Atlantic world-making, and diasporic relations to the continent. Many of these writers—from Lagos to Antigua, from Achebe to Selvon—worked within and against the Western canon in a language that was either adopted or imposed. Without references or frameworks, they wrote characters that were seemingly unrepresentable. It is in the work of these early novelists, in their legacy that This Kind of Trouble found permission to be itself. In honor of these elders, this list collects some of my favorite contemporary African novelists and puts them in conversation with the older African-Atlantic literatures they call to mind.
The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole
Bankole’s debut novel reads like a soulful meditation on fate, ruptured ambition, and the inevitability of endings. It follows the lives of three women, separated across generations, and a prophecy that appears to seal their destiny. Moving from Ibadan to New Orleans, America morphs from its promise as a place of reinventions to a place of fragmented returns. What I love most about The Edge of Water is the way it echoes with Yoruba traditional lores, the inescapable weight of the supernatural on the lives of its characters. It is a deeply moving novel that draws on the epistolary form and explores the domestic sphere as a site of gendered suffering and disillusionment in a way that reminds me of Mariama Ba’s 1971 novel, So Long a Letter.
The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohammed Mbougar Sarr
Sarr’s meta-literary novel follows a young scholar turned novelist as he becomes obsessed with a fictional writer, T.C. Elimane, a mysterious literary genius who seems to have denounced literature and then vanished. I don’t think of Sarr as an upcoming talent—he’s already won France’s most prestigious literary prize—but I include his work for its intellectual scope, and the way it grapples with this question of African literary lineage. His prose moves from confessional intimacy to historical digressions, and his self-reflective style and philosophical treatise are reminiscent of J.E. Casely Hayford and his 1911 novel, Ethiopia Unbound. While Hayford, like many writers of his time, was more occupied with political emancipation rather than literary survival, he and Sarr share a sharp eye for dialogic discourse and meta fictionality.
Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh
In Ibeh’s Blessings, we follow Obiefuna, an adolescent coming to terms with his queer identity through a string of charged, often transgressive relationships that occur in his home and seminary boarding school. As the novel builds towards its critique of the 2014 anti-gay laws in Nigeria, Obiefuna must reckon with the cost of existing in a society that criminalizes queer desire. Ibeh’s bildungsroman reminds me of Tsi Tsi Dangarembga’s 1988 Nervous Conditions, which dwells in the same quiet, compelling interiority of a young protagonist who, in Dangarembga’s story, must contend with the small betrayals of a family insistent on defining her place in the world.
The Tiny Things Are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo
Esther Okonkwo’s debut, The Tiny Things Are Heavier, follows Sommy, a woman who has just arrived in Iowa for graduate school. Her early brush with America has none of the usual wide-eyed fascinations that grateful immigrants have. Instead, Sommy carries the weight of a relationship rupture; her brother, recently deported from Norway, has attempted to harm himself. This familial uncertainty sends Sommy careening into desperate sexual encounters, first with her roommate Bayo, and then her boyfriend, Bryan. The novel carries a particular Nigerianness in its dialogue, and this in turn gives it a spirited nostalgia. It reminds me of the 1977 novel Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo. Where Aidoo’s protagonist, Sissie, is sharp-tongued and more lucid in tracing the mires of the African condition abroad, Okonkwo’s Sommy carries a quiet, understated mode to carry out her exploration of young womanhood and the search for her place in the world.
What Napoleon Could Not Do by DK Nnuro
At forty, Jacob, handsome but unmarried, still lives with his father. Nnuro’s What Napoleon Could Not Do, a braided narrative about immigration and the trope of the American dream, draws from Jacob’s endless rejections, the latest of which is his failure to secure a visa to join his long-distance wife in America. It also turns to his sister, who lives in the U.S. but has spent a decade awaiting a green card despite being married to an American citizen. I especially love Nnuro’s shimmering use of irony and quiet humor to tell this story. Jacob’s arc calls to mind V.S. Naipaul’s 1961 novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, another portrait of a man seemingly thwarted by the circumstances of his birth. Nnuro shares Naipaul’s eye for weaving local lore into the everyday life of his characters. His dialogue, especially between Mr. Nti and Kwame Broni, is wicked, sharp, and a dazzling reminder of Naipaul’s brilliance on the page.
The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan
Khan’s novel has been described as spooky and gothic. It follows Sana—who describes herself as “un-mothered”—as she and her father move into a strange, haunted mansion in Durban. On the surface, it is a ghost story about a grieving Djinn and Sana’s discovery of the mansion’s long buried secrets. But at a deeper level, it is a story of loss, absence, and the unfinished work of mourning. Dead are everywhere in the novel’s landscape: a dead sibling taunts Sana, the Djinn follows her around, and the mansion itself—decrepit with its fluttering bulbs and broken plumbing—creates an underworldly aura. Khan adds a cultural and emotional specificity to gothic tropes that makes the novel particularly relevant in an African literary archive. I think of the enduring legacy of Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard, a 1952 novel which subverts the natural order of place-making and imagines a world where humans and ghosts can exist on the same terrain, one in which the supernatural is not a departure but a way of unearthing the secrets of the natural.
A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo
In Nigeria, madness is not always understood through a clinical or diagnostic lens. It can be a kind of colloquial shorthand, a way to capture misbehavior or everyday excess—wanting things that are just beyond reach, leaning towards the impossible, even the absurd. Uche Okonkwo captures this sentiment beautifully in her collection, A Kind of Madness. Her characters—a young woman with dreams of an international marriage; a boy hoping his family will adopt a chicken; teenage girls navigating the excitement and pessimism of puberty and boarding school—are piercingly perceptive, yet ordinary people. Okonkwo brings a sharply ironic clarity to narrating her characters that remind me of Annie in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. It’s that piercing gaze of youthful innocence as it watches its personal world collapsing around it. This is a book to cherish.