We are halfway through the third quarter of 2024 and if you are a bookworm looking to explore African literature, then we have just the list for you. Whether you want to immerse yourself in the familiarity of seasoned authors or a debut author looking to make their mark, the upcoming months offer diverse voices. In this article, we will delve into the most anticipated titles across multiple genres that showcase the continent’s finest.
1 . When It All Falls Down by Chinedu Achebe
In the stirring sequel to The Miseducation of Obi Ifeanyi, Obi and Nkechi Ifeanyi, along with their children, Ikechukwu and Chimamanda, navigate the turbulent waters of modern America in the backdrop of Houston, Texas. Amidst the global upheaval of Covid 19, the Ifeanyis strive to rekindle their marriage, seeking solace in each other as the world outside contends with racial strife and political storms. As the contentious 2020 US presidential election unfolds, their story is a testament to the enduring power of family, the complexities of identity, and the relentless pursuit of happiness against all odds. This is a story of love, resilience, and the unyielding bonds that hold us together when the world seems to be falling apart.
Release date: 24 August 2024
2. Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu
After abandoning his once promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Helen-a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love, but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Helen on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington DC that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel,the larger-than-life father-figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.
With Helen and their two-year old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he’d been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel’s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breath-taking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America’s most prodigiously gifted novelists.
Released: 30 July 2024
3 . And So I Roar by Abi Dare
A stunning, heart wrenching new novel from Abi Daré, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl with the Louding Voice
When Tia accidentally overhears a whispered conversation between her mother—terminally ill and lying in a hospital bed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria—and her aunt, the repercussions will send her on a desperate quest to uncover a secret her mother has been hiding for nearly two decades.
Back home in Lagos a few days later, Adunni, a plucky fourteen-year-old runaway, is lying awake in Tia’s guest room. Having escaped from her rural village in a desperate bid to seek a better future, she’s finally found refuge with Tia, who has helped her enroll in school. It’s always been Adunni’s dream to get an education, and she’s bursting with excitement.
Suddenly, there’s a horrible knocking at the front gate. . . .
It’s only the beginning of a harrowing ordeal that will see Tia forced to make a terrible choice between protecting Adunni or finally learning the truth behind the secret her mother has hidden from her. And Adunni will learn that her “louding voice,” as she calls it, is more important than ever, as she must advocate to save not only herself but all the young women of her home village, Ikati.
If she succeeds, she may transform Ikati into a place where girls are allowed to claim the bright futures they deserve—and shout their stories to the world.
Release date: 06 August 2024
4 . An Imperfect Storm by Chikwe and Vivianne Ihekweazu
The word epidemic is a common one in our lexicon, but most people had never experienced one. All that changed in December 2019 when rumors of a “pneumonia-like illness” began to circulate from Wuhan, China. While many around the world may not have ignored it, an infectious disease epidemiologist on a Christmas break in Amaigbo, South-eastern Nigeria recognised a potential warning sign.
Before that day, a journey of detours, discovery and destiny began for Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, a path that led him to becoming the Director General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). The work to build the NCDC into an institution of repute was complex and challenging. Each step, initiative, staff hire, and resource allocation contributed to Nigeria’s ability to respond to an unprecedented global event—a pandemic not witnessed at this scale in over a hundred years. COVID-19 was not just any outbreak, but a seismic shift in world affairs and history, leaving a lasting effect on lives, the economy, health, information dissemination, politics, and ideological systems.
This book explores the phenomenon never before witnessed in grand scale and in small details. It is a book about the love of humanity, the power of family, of hope, resilience, and collaboration. It is Chikwe and Vivianne Ihekweazu’s personal account, but also an important piece of history.
Released: 08 August 2024
5 . Besaydoo by Yalie Saweda Kamara
Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language.
A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with “a story pulsing in every blood cell.” In Besaydoo, Kamara serves as griot for the Freeborn in Oakland, the Sierra Leonean in California, the girl straddling womanhood, the woman re-discovering herself. “I am made from the obsession of detail,” she writes, setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief: the memory of her mother’s singing, savory stacks of lumpia, a church where “everyone is broken, but trying.” A multitudinous witness.
Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languages—Krio, English, French, poetry’s many dialects—to highlight mechanisms not just for survival, but for abundance. “I make myth for peace,” she writes, as well as for loss, for delight, for kinship, and most of all for a country where Black means “steadfast and opulent,” and “dangerous and infinite.” She writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.
But in Besaydoo, there is no partition between the living and the dead. There is no past nor present. There is, instead, a joyful simultaneity—a liberating togetherness sustained by song.
The Besaydoo audiobook read by Yalie Saweda Kamara is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks.
Release Date: 01 September 2024
6 . Between Friends And Friends: A Novel by Shirlene Obuobi
To thousands of Instagram followers Josephine Boateng is the dazzling Dr. Jojo, and her opinions on health and self-love matter. Her message: be smart, be significant, and do not put up with foolish men.
Off-camera, Jo’s story is more complicated. She’s grappling with depression and the pressures of her career, and her love life is nonexistent thanks to a longtime unrequited crush on her best friend, romcom heartthrob Ezra Adelman. But when Ezra shows up to his thirtieth birthday party with her childhood bully on his arm, Jo realizes enough is enough. It’s time to take her own advice and prioritize herself.
No one is more shocked than Malcolm Waters when his debut novel turns him into a literary darling, the type who gets invited to a swanky penthouse party to discuss film opportunities. Rubbing elbows with the elite of entertainment will be great for his career—except he’s terrible with people, and even worse at networking.
Just when Malcolm is ready to throw in the towel, he’s rescued by none other than Dr. Jojo. He’s been following her on social media for years, and she’s even more impressive in real life. And to his bewilderment, the feeling is mutual.
But Jo, Ezra, and Malcolm exist in a world where the line between private and public is as blurred as the line between friendship and love. The question is, can they risk defining those lines to create something real?
Released: 30 July 2024
7 . Born In A House Of Glass by Chinenye Emezie
As Udonwa grows, her hidden family history changes her forever.
Let me tell you a story. It’s about a war. This war is not the type fought with guns and machetes. It is a family type. A silent war. The type fought in the heart. It began long before I was formed.
Udonwa’s family is at war — a war of relationships, played out under the tyranny of a monster dad. Age twelve, Udonwa has a peculiar love for her father, Reverend Leonard Ilechukwu, who favours her but beats his wife and his other children. She sees his good side: after all, he pays the school fees, and tells her that she, named “the peaceful child,” is the one most likely to become a doctor.
When her newly married eldest sister suddenly takes her from their family compound in Iruama, Nigeria, to live with her in Awka, Udonwa experiences violence first-hand. Later, pieces of a sinister picture emerge that shake her life to the core.
No longer the person she thought she was, Udonwa launches into a period of extreme change, and parts of her life spiral into chaos as she finds herself torn between her love for her father and an underlying need to free herself. This vivid family saga is engrossing, deeply unsettling, and finally uplifting.
Released: July 2024
8 . Half Portraits Under Water by Dennis Mugaa
Half Portraits Under Water is a collection of ten loosely interlinked stories that explore love, loss, and the interconnected nature of human experiences.
In Kenya, a politician is murdered in broad daylight and several testimonies narrated to an unseen commissioner tries to get to the truth; a mother desperately tries to protect her freedom-fighting son from a ruthless and vindictive government regime; a young boy in a slum heads to a football pitch with his friend for what would be the last time as his country shifts politically to a new power; in an elite school for gifted young adults, a girl with a despotic father disappears and soon her three friends have to make a deal with the devil in order to hold on to their dreams.
Through these ten stories set against the moving backdrop of sociopolitical changes in different countries, discover the profound connections that shape our lives, intertwining themes of love, grief, and what it means to be deeply, unflinchingly human.
Released: 14 August 2024
9 . In The Shadow Of The Fall (Guardians Of The God, 1) by Tobi Ogundiran
A cosmic war reignites and the fate of the orisha lie in the hands of an untried acolyte in this first entry of a new epic fantasy novella duology by Tobi Ogundiran, for fans of N. K. Jemisin and Tomi Adeyemi.
“The novella of the year has arrived!”―Mark Oshiro, #1 New York Times bestselling author.
Ashâke is an acolyte in the temple of Ifa, yearning for the day she is made a priestess and sent out into the world to serve the orisha. But of all the acolytes, she is the only one the orisha refuse to speak to. For years she has watched from the sidelines as peer after peer passes her by and ascends to full priesthood.
Desperate, Ashâke attempts to summon and trap an orisha―any orisha. Instead, she experiences a vision so terrible it draws the attention of a powerful enemy sect and thrusts Ashâke into the center of a centuries-old war that will shatter the very foundations of her world.
Released: 06 August 2024
10. Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi
Set in a wonderfully reimagined 15th century West Africa, Masquerade is a dazzling, lyrical tale exploring the true cost of one woman’s fight for freedom and self-discovery, and the lengths she’ll go to secure her future.
“A bewitching, thrilling and vibrant novel that had me enthralled with every twist and turn.” ―Jennifer Saint, New York Times bestselling author
Òdòdó’s hometown of Timbuktu has been conquered by the warrior king of Yorùbáland, and living conditions for the women in her blacksmith guild, who were already shunned as social pariahs, grow even worse.
Then Òdòdó is abducted. She is whisked across the Sahara to the capital city of Ṣàngótẹ̀, where she is shocked to discover that her kidnapper is none other than the vagrant who had visited her guild just days prior. But now that he is swathed in riches rather than rags, Òdòdó realizes he is not a vagrant at all; he is the warrior king, and he has chosen her to be his wife.
In a sudden change of fortune, Òdòdó soars to the very heights of society. But after a lifetime of subjugation, she finds the power that saturates this world of battle and political savvy too enticing to resist. As tensions with rival states grow, revealing elaborate schemes and enemies hidden in plain sight, Òdòdó must defy the cruel king she has been forced to wed by reforging the shaky loyalties of the court in her favor, or risk losing everything―including her life.
Loosely based on the myth of Persephone, O.O. Sangoyomi’s Masquerade takes you on a journey of epic power struggles and political intrigue which turn an entire region on its head.
Released: 02 July 2024
We couldn’t possibly capture all of the incredible talent from our continent in just one list. Think of this selection as a small taste of the incredible stories and voices waiting for you. Get ready for an exciting literary season filled with the promise of African brilliance.
Happy reading!
Bongiwe T. Maphosa
Bongiwe Maphosa is a budding author with a passion for storytelling. With her thought-provoking narratives, she takes her readers on a literary adventure. Bongiwe's works on the human condition from a fresh perspective have earned her recognition and publications in the Avbob Poetry Anthology of 2019, The Writer's Club of South Africa 2021, and JAY Lit in 2021. She hopes to cement her place in the literary community.
