“This is not happening. This is not happening.” Chika Unigwe‘s On Black Sisters’ Street is the 2012 winner of the famed $100,000 Nigeria Prize For literature, and one word settled on my mind after reading it. Ruthless! Originally written in Dutch as Fata Morgana and translated later into English, On Black Sisters’ Street is an…
In a brutal fashion similar to Khaled Hosseini‘s, Ayobami Adebayo‘s A Spell of Good Things turns out to be a compendium of emotions detailing the travails of a family under an attack by poverty propelled by the government’s retrenchment of the family’s head, Baba Eniola from his work as a history teacher. Another family, the…
The literary year dawned with a bang in Abuja as M.S. Dogara presented the trio of his latest publications on 8th January. The trio span the three genres of prose fiction, poetry and drama and respectively entitled, Walking in Storms, Sparks in the Meadow and A Midnight Migrant. Reviewed by Mike Ekunno, Walking in Storms…
In “Freshwater,” Akwaeke Emezi tells a story that’s a bit like peeling an onion—lots of layers. I found it wordy when I started reading it; it took a while before I adjusted to the language. But once I got in, pausing to take breaks was a problem. It is that engrossing. Freshwater breaks the rules…
Dreams and Assorted Nightmares by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim is a collection of intertwined short stories set in an unknown land in Nigeria—a mystical place called Zango where its inhabitants die when leaves fall from a magnificent live tree in a vast and dark forest called Kurmi. These stories explore the spaces between the earthly realm…
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