15. The Son Of The House By Cheluchi Onyemelukwe Onuobia.
“I would make a good son of the house, I sometimes thought. But what fell to me was not carrying on the family name but ensuring that the one who was to do so succeeded.”
~
The lives of two Nigerian women divided by class and social inequality intersect when they’re kidnapped, and held captive, forced to await their fate together. While awaiting their fate, they start sharing their life stories. We are transported back in time to their lives before their incarceration.
Nwabulu- a housemaid since the age of 10. She falls in love with a rich man’s son while nurturing her dream of becoming a typist one day.
Julie- independent, educated and privileged, living life on her own terms, she enjoys the spoils and riches that comes with dating a married woman, even though she has no intention of ever being a second child wife to love struck Eugene.
Divided by class, both women have no idea that their lives are connected/intertwined in ways that are unimaginable to them.
Year Of Publication: 2019
Number of Pages: 288
14. Butter Honey Pig Bread By Francesca Ekwuyasi
“Life is an ambivalent lover. One moment you are everything and life wants to consume you entirely. The next moment you are an insignificant speck of nothing.”
~
Butter Honey Pig Bread is told from the perspectives of three women, Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Taiye and Kehinde.
Kambirinachi and her two daughters become estranged from one another because of a trauma that Kehinde experiences in childhood, which leads her to move away and cut off all contact. She ultimately finds her path as an artist and seeks to raise a family of her own, despite her fear that she won’t be a good mother. Meanwhile, Taiye is plagued by guilt for what her sister suffered and also runs away, attempting to fill the void of that lost relationship with casual flings with women. She eventually discovers a way out of her stifling loneliness through a passion for food and cooking.
But now, after more than a decade of living apart, Taiye and Kehinde have returned home to Lagos. It is here that the three women must face each other and address the wounds of the past if they are to reconcile and move forward.
Year Of Publication :2020
Number Of Pages: 320
13.’The Girl With The Louding Voice’ By Abi Darè.
“Your schooling is your voice, child. It will be speaking for you even if you didn’t open your mouth to talk. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come.
That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice…….
I want a louding voice.”
~
All the narrator, a fourteen year old Nigerian girl Adunni wants is an education, and to be a teacher.
But alas, she is sold as a third wife by her father to a man decades older than her, in exchange for rent money and food. At the hands of her new husband, Adunni is made to experience things that no fourteen year old should ever have to experience at the hands of her husband and his first wife.
When the second wife dies tragically and it looks like Adunni will be forced to pay for a crime she didn’t commit, she runs away from home, and ends up being sold as a maid to a harsh mistress, Big Mama in Lagos.
Written in broken English, The Girl With The Louding Voice is a story of resilience, of hope, of determination. Throughout the story, the hardships and abuse Adunni faces,her determination and resolve to get an education, even going ahead to read and study on her own, shines brightly.
Year Of Publication:2020
Number Of Pages: 371
12. In Every Mirror She’s Black By Lola Akinmade Akerstorm
“Privilege comes in levels, Brit. You have the privilege he has given you. But you will never have the privilege he has just because he breathes.”
~
Three black women are linked in unexpected ways to the same influential white man – Jonny Von Lundin, as they embark on their new lives in Sweden.
Kemi- a successful marketing executive lured from the US to Sweden to help fix a PR crisis in his marketing firm,
Brittany-Rae Johnson – an almost 40 year old flight attendant, and the object of his unhealthy obsession, lured from her job and thrust into his life of wealth, privilege, luxury and of course, loneliness,
Muna Saheed – a troubled refugee, plagued throughout the story with her loss.
Year Of Publication: 2021
Number Of Pages: 416
11. Love in Color By Bolu Babalola
A high-born Nigerian goddess, who has been beaten down and unappreciated by her gregarious lover, longs to be truly seen.
A young businesswoman attempts a great leap in her company, and an even greater one in her love life.
A powerful Ghanaian spokeswoman is forced to decide whether she should uphold her family’s politics or be true to her heart.
In her debut collection, internationally acclaimed writer Bolu Babalola retells the most beautiful love stories from history and mythology with incredible new detail and vivacity. Focusing on the magical folktales of West Africa, Babalola also reimagines Greek myths, ancient legends from the Middle East, and stories from long-erased places.
Year Of Publication: 2020
Number Of Pages: 304
10.A Broken People’s Playlist By Chimeka Garricks
A Broken People’s Playlist is a collection of short stories with underlying themes so beautifully woven that each story flows into the other seamlessly. From its poignant beginning in “Lost Stars” a story about love and it’s fleeting, transient nature to the gritty, raw musical prose encapsulated in “In The City”, a tale of survival set in the alleyways of the waterside. A Broken People’s Playlist is a mosaic of stories about living, loving and hurting through very familiar sounds, in very familiar ways and finding healing in the most unlikely places.
The stories are also part-homage and part-love letter to Port Harcourt (the city which most of them are set in). The prose is distinctive as it is concise and unapologetically Nigerian. And because the collection is infused with the magic of evocative storytelling, everyone is promised a story, a character, to move or haunt them.
Year Of Publication: 2020
Number Of Pages: 255
9. Yinka, Where is Your Huzband By Lizzie Damilola Blackburn
“You need to define who you are. Otherwise, people will happily do it for you.”
~
Meet Yinka: a thirty-something, Oxford-educated, British Nigerian woman with a well-paid job, good friends, and a mother whose constant refrain is “Yinka, where is your huzband?”
Yinka’s Nigerian aunties frequently pray for her delivery from singledom, her work friends think she’s too traditional (she’s saving herself for marriage!), her girlfriends think she needs to get over her ex already, and the men in her life…well, that’s a whole other story. But Yinka herself has always believed that true love will find her when the time is right.
Still, when her cousin gets engaged, Yinka commences Operation Find-A-Date for Rachel’s Wedding. Aided by a spreadsheet and her best friend, Yinka is determined to succeed. Will Yinka find herself a huzband? And what if the thing she really needs to find is herself?
Year Of Publication: 2022
Number Of Pages: 384
8. Ace Of Spades By Faridah Abike-Iyimide
“I didn’t invent this twisted system that pits us against each other and makes us do crappy things for status- but I do know how to play it”.
~
Welcome to Niveus Private Academy, where money paves the hallways, and the students are never less than perfect. Until now. Because anonymous texter, Aces, is bringing two students’ dark secrets to light.
Talented musician Devon buries himself in rehearsals, but he can’t escape the spotlight when his private photos go public. Head girl Chiamaka isn’t afraid to get what she wants, but soon everyone will know the price she has paid for power.
Someone is out to get them both. Someone who holds all the aces. And they’re planning much more than a high-school game…
Year Of Publication: 2021
Number of Pages: 470
7. My Sister The Serial Killer’ By Oyinkan Braithwaite.
“Ayoola summons me with these three words-
Korede, I killed him.
I had hoped I would never hear those words again”.
“Femi makes three, you know. Three and they label you a serial killer
My Sister The Serial Killer is a blackly comic novel about how blood is thicker- and more difficult to get out of the carpet- than water.
Set in Lagos, Nigeria, My Sister The Serial Killer tells the story of two very different sisters – Korede and Ayoola.
Ayoola the freespirited, beautiful younger daughter is a social media savy fashion designer with a penchant for killing her lovers, supposedly in self defence.
Korede, our protagonist is the responsible and practical one, a hard-working and well respected nurse, when she isn’t cleaning up murder scenes and disposing of dead bodies for her sister.
She also has a crush on Tade, a handsome young doctor in the hospital where she works.
Things start falling apart when Ayoola visits her sister at work and starts going on dates with the Doctor of Korede’s dreams. Korede isn’t prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back, but to save him would mean sacrifing her sister.
Year Of Publication: 2018
Number Of Pages: 266
6. Women Of The Ayo-Kessington Dynasty By Layemi Olusoga
“It’s funny how people believe a thirty year old woman is still young. A thirty year old woman has not really ‘seen’ anything. She still has a lot to learn. She still has to grow up, develop herself and become her own woman. I have experienced several lifetimes and I am just thirty. I have grown. I have delved into my psyche and been reborn. The ups and downs. The joy and sorrow. The tears and laughter.”
~
“Being a part of the Ayo-Kesington dynasty is not a small thing oh. My eyes have seen and my ears have truly heard.” -These are the words of Anjola, in the introductory part of Volume 1 of Women of the Ayo-Kessington dynasty.
It is the diary of Anjola Ayo-Kessington a lady of unknown pedigree whose life changed when she got married to her older boss and lover, Tokunboh from a powerful and prestigious family. Her marriage to Tokunbo thrusts her into a world of affluence and fame, but it comes with it’s own responsibilities and challenges. She is forced to sacrifice her personal ambition in order to conform to the ideology of what an Ayo-Kessington wife should be.
What’s worse, her mother-in-law, the family matriarch who dictates when the sun shines and sets in the family isn’t happy about Anjola’s marriage to her son, and treats Anjola with condescension and derision.
Add an ex-lover and some hidden secrets coming to light to the mix and what you have is a perfect script for a romcom series.
Year Of Publication:2017
Number Of Pages: 286
5. Daughters Who Walk This Path By Yejide Kilanko
“I had heard much about evil growing up, for we were told that evil is the barren, one-toothed step grandmother whose food we were never to eat. That evil is the no-good stranger lurking at the marketplace, waiting patiently for a chance to steal little children right from under the noses of distracted caregivers. “Run away the instant a stranger offers you a smile,” Mummy would tell us. But no one told us that sometimes evil is found much closer to home, and that those who want to harm us can have the most soothing and familiar voices.”
~
Spirited and intelligent, Morayo grows up surrounded by school friends and family in busy, modern-day Ibadan, Nigeria. An adoring little sister, their traditional parents, and a host of aunties and cousins make Morayo’s home their own. So there’s nothing unusual about her charming but troubled cousin Bros T moving in with the family. At first Morayo and her sister are delighted, but in her innocence, nothing prepares Morayo for the shameful secret Bros T forces upon her. Thrust into a web of oppressive silence woven by the adults around her, Morayo must learn to fiercely protect herself and her sister from a legacy of silence many women in Morayo’s family share. Only Aunty Morenike—once shielded by her own mother—provides Morayo with a safe home and a sense of female community that sustains her as she grows into a young woman in bustling, politically charged, often violent Nigeria.
Year Of Publication: 2012
Number Of Pages: 329
4. Stay With Me By Ayobami Adebayo
” Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist.”
~
Yejide and Akin have been married since they met and fell in love at university. Though many expected Akin to take several wives, he and Yejide have always agreed: polygamy is not for them. But four years into their marriage–after consulting fertility doctors and healers, trying strange teas and unlikely cures–Yejide is still not pregnant. She assumes she still has time–until her family arrives on her doorstep with a young woman they introduce as Akin’s second wife. Furious, shocked, and livid with jealousy, Yejide knows the only way to save her marriage is to get pregnant, which, finally, she does–but at a cost far greater than she could have dared to imagine. An electrifying novel of enormous emotional power, Stay With Me asks how much we can sacrifice for the sake of family.
Year Of Publication: 2017
Number Of Pages: 260
3. The Mechanics of Yenegoa By Michael Afenfia
Ebinimi, star mechanic of Kalakala Street, is a man with a hapless knack for getting in and out of trouble. Some of his troubles are self-inflicted: like his recurring entanglements in love triangles; and his unauthorised joyriding of a customer’s car which sets off a chain of dire events involving drugs, crooked politicians, and assassins. Other troubles are caused by the panorama of characters in his life, like: his sister and her dysfunctional domestic situation; the three other mechanics he employs; and the money-loving preacher who has all but taken over his home.
Year Of Publication: 2020
Number Of Pages: 305
2. The Death Of Vivek Oji By Akwaeke Emezi
“I’m not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn’t have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And everyday, it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn’t even exist to them.
So: if nobody sees you, are you still there?”
~
One day in Southeastern Nigeria, a woman finds the body of her son, Vivek on the porch of their house, wrapped in colorful fabric. It appears he has been beaten to death.
Of course, his parents are grief stricken. While his father accepts that these things happen in a country wrought with violence, his mother is desperate to understand what happened to her son. What led to his death?
The death of Vivek Oji is a story of identity, sexuality, friendship and grief, told in a series of flashback by the people grieving him.
Vivek struggled with his identity, suffered moments of disconnection between himself and his surroundings. He could only let his guard down with his friends: the daughters of the Nigerwives, a group of foreign-born women married to Nigerian men.
Year Of Publication: 2020
Number Of Pages: 248
1. Everything Good Will Come By Sefi Atta
“People say I was hot headed in my twenties. I don’t ever remember being hot headed. I only ever remember calling out to my voice. In my country, women are praised the more they surrender their right to protest. In the end they may die with nothing but selflessness to pass on to their daughters; a startling legacy, like tears down a parched throat.”
~
It is 1971, a year after the Biafran War, and Nigeria is under military rule—though the politics of the state matter less than those of her home to Enitan Taiwo, an eleven-year-old girl tired of waiting for school to start. Will her mother, who has become deeply religious since the death of Taiwo’s brother, allow her friendship with the new girl next door, the brash and beautiful Sheri Bakare? Everything Good Will Come charts the fate of these two African girls, one born of privilege and the other, a lower class “half-caste”; one who is prepared to manipulate the traditional system while the other attempts to defy it.
Written in the voice of Enitan, the novel traces this unusual friendship into their adult lives, against the backdrop of tragedy, family strife, and a war-torn Nigeria. In the end, Everything Good Will Come is Enitan’s story; one of a fiercely intelligent, strong young woman coming of age in a culture that still insists on feminine submission. Enitan bucks the familial and political systems until she is confronted with the one desire too precious to forfeit in the name of personal freedom: her desire for a child. Everything Good Will Come evokes the sights and smells of Africa while imparting a wise and universal story of love, friendship, prejudice, survival, politics, and the cost of divided loyalties.
Year Of Publication:2005
Number Of Pages: 336
