Arundhati Roy‘s The God of Small Things is the ninth novel I’ve read this year, making it my most productive year for fiction. I’m primarily a reader of papers and non-fiction, and to be honest, this book isn’t for the amateur reader. However, it’s entertaining and, in my opinion, a truly worthy winner of the…
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a novel by Khaled Hosseini that tells the story of two women, Mariam and Laila, separated by years of birth and childhood, but bound by their future in adulthood; as co-wives to a brooding Rasheed in a sad household. This household and their backstory are the microcosm of the story…
“The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives” by Lola Shoneyin is a sadly beautiful tale that exposes the complexities of a polygamous household. When Bolanle, a young university graduate, decides to settle, she settles, not with the conventional husband as her parents and loved ones would have wished, but with the patriarch of the Alao…
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…