CHINUA ACHEBE
Things fall apart
Okonko, leader of an Igbo community, is exiled for seven years after accidentally killing a clansman. When he returns, he resists the changes brought about by European missionaries. This novel describes the cost of colonialism.

Anthills of the savannah
A story of betrayal, love, violent death, and hope set amidst the political and emotional turmoil of Achebe's native Nigeria.

AMA ATA AIDOO
No sweetness here
Eleven stories explore postcolonial life in Ghana in an unusual presentation of varied West African experiences.

RONAN BENNETT
The catastrophist
Irish novelist James Gillespie arrives in the Congo in 1959 to woo back his former lover, now a follower of Patrice Lumumba, who became the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and was assassinated a short time later.

WILLIAM BOYD
Brazzaville Beach
British ecologist Hope Clearwater goes to Africa both to escape a bad marriage and to study chimpanzees with a famous scientist.

ANDRE BRINK
A chain of voices
Galant has always been treated in some way as a member of his master’s family but he realizes he will always be a slave and he leads a revolt in South Africa in 1825.

A dry white season
Ben Du Toit, a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg, has lived his life secure in the belief that the government of South Africa is fair and benevolent. When a black friend is arrested and then “commits suicide” in police custody, Du Toit wants to believe that the death was somehow an accident. Du Toit’s quest for the truth earns him a newfound commitment to justice in a radically unjust society.

Looking on darkness
Banned for many years in the author's native South Africa, Looking On Darkness tells the story of black actor Joseph Malan as he awaits execution for the murder of his white lover.

J.M. COETZEE
Disgrace
In a novel set in post-apartheid South Africa, a fifty-two-year-old college professor who has lost his job for sleeping with a student tries to relate to his daughter, Lucy, who works with an ambitious African farmer

Life and times of Michael K
Simple-minded Micheal K, 31 and disfigured from birth, loses his job as a Cape Town gardener. He and his sick mother then set out on a journey to her hometown, but his mother dies before they reach their destination. Michael must make a life alone in the war-torn country, trying to eke out a life on an abandoned farm

Age of Iron
South African professor Mrs. Curren has always been opposed to apartheid's brutality though she has lived isolated from its horrors, but as she nears death from cancer, she confronts a generation of blood and revenge.

Youth
Hoping to escape his South African home, dysfunctional family, and what he believes to be an impending revolution, a young man becomes disappointed with his monotonous new life in London and begins a dark pilgrimage.

JOSEPH CONRAD
Heart of darkness
This is the story of Marlowe’s journey into the heart of Africa in search of Kurtz, who originally came to Africa to “civilize” the natives.

RICHARD DOOLING
White Man’s grave
This is a satirical novel about the culture clash in Africa – a young American goes to Sierra Leone in search of his missing best friend, a peace corps volunteer.

BUCHI EMECHETA
The joys of motherhood
A Nigerian woman is cast off when she fails to conceive in her first marriage but regains the respect of her people when she has eight children in a second marriage.

GILES FODEN
The last king of Scotland
A Scottish doctor’s desire for adventure places him in 1970s Uganda, working for the Ministry of Health and then as personal physician to the dictator Idi Amin.

Ladysmith
Foden dramatizes the four-month siege during the Boer War of the South African town of Ladysmith in 1899. The dire experiences of the inhabitants are described from a variety of perspectives, including Bella Kiernan, the daughter of an Irish hotelier; war correspondent Henry Nevinson; and English soldier Tom Barnes

NADINE GORDIMER
The House Gun
Nobel Prize winter Nadine Gordimer has long been considered a preeminent interpreter of South Africa, and also its conscience. The House Gun follows the descent of Harald and Claudia Lingard as they learn about the realities of violence and criminal justice in post-apartheid South Africa.

None to accompany me
In the turmoil immediately preceding South Africa's passing of majority rule, a lawyer who represents Blacks and a formerly exiled family struggle with life changes.

My son’s story
When Will sees his black activist father at a movie theater with a white woman, it triggers his imagination, and he becomes caught in a painful adolescent confusion swamped with thoughts of family life, sexual jealousy, and political action.

GRAHAM GREENE
A burnt-out case
When Querry, world-famous architect, no longer enjoys life or takes pleasure in art, he sets off on a voyage to a leper colony in the Congo.

The heart of the matter
An assistant police commissioner in a West African coastal town lets passion overrule his honor

The human factor
The senior officers of Britain's secret service, dealing with intelligence gathered in South Africa during the Cold War when apartheid was in full swing, move to plug a leak by eliminating a junior colleague, unmindful of a veteran intelligence processor whose decency, courage, and capacity for love threaten all security.

KATHRYN HULME
The nun’s story
Gabrielle, wanting to save her fellow man, tries diligently to discipline her independent mind for 17 years as a nurse in a hospital for the insane and then in a Congo mission but ultimately faces the bitter truth that the religious life is not for her.

ERNEST HEMMINGWAY
Green hills of Africa
This is the adventure story of a hunt for big game in Africa that captures the vitality of the region. Hemingway describes the thrill of the hunt, the primal glory of the kill, and the loveliness of the African landscape.

Snows of Kilimanjaro
This stream-of-consciousness narrative relates the feelings of Harry, a novelist dying of gangrene poisoning while on an African safari. Knowing he will die before he wakes, Harry goes to sleep; he dreams the rescue plane has taken him to a summit of Kilimanjaro called the House of God, where he sees a legendary leopard. Hemingway considered The Snows of Kilimanjaro his finest story.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER
The poisonwood bible
The family of a fierce evangelical Baptist missionary--Nathan Price, his wife, and his four daughters--begins to unravel after they embark on a 1959 mission to the Belgian Congo, where they find their lives transformed over the course of three decades

DORIS LESSING
Landlocked
In the aftermath of World War II, Martha Quest finds herself completely disillusioned. She is losing faith with the communist movement in Africa, and her marriage to one of the movement's leaders is disintegrating. Determined to resist the erosion of her personality, she engages in the first satisfactory love affair and breaks free, if only momentarily, from her suffocating unhappiness.

African stories
This is a collection of the best of Doris Lessing's short stories and a couple of novellas all set in her native Africa. From Rhodesia to Kenya and such we see many different stories and perspectives. Lessing’s stories begin in the early part of the 1900s and as they progress into the 1950s and 1960s the political tone changes with the times without being a political narrative.

SARA MAITLAND
Ancestral truths
Unable to recall the mountain climbing accident in which another hiker died and she lost her hand on Mount Nyangani, Clare returns to Scotland. Only with her family's encouragement, as well as their challenges, will she be able to face the tragedy head on and move forward in her life.

BERYL MARKHAM
Splendid outcast: Beryl Markham’s African stories
Written in the 1940s for magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal and Collier's, these eight stories belong both to their time and to their author. About horses, flying and romance, the early autobiographical stories in particular are vivid with details of African custom and landscape gleaned from the author's early life in Kenya.

JAMES MICHENER
Covenant
The tortuous history of South Africa is chronicled from the first arrival of European immigrants in the 15th century. The Dutch and English settlement and conflict with the native people are dramatized in scenes that include the epic Great Trek and the Boer War, as well as the creation of the modern nation of South Africa and its rigid system of apartheid.

BEN OKRI
The famished road
This Booker Prize winner chronicles the daily life in a small African community in Nigeria. It is the story of the child Azaro, who endures the impoverishments and political upheavals in his country while also experiencing the wonders and terrors of a spirit world that only he can see.

ALAN PATON
Cry, the beloved country
The Reverend Stephen Kumalo goes to Johannesburg to find his sister and his son, only to find the former has become a prostitute and the latter has been convicted of murder. Brought on by apartheid, the book is a moving plea for racial understanding.

ALAN SCHOLEFIELD
The sea cave
Young Katie Buchanan discovers a community torn by murder, suspicion and fear when she journeys to a decaying South African town to work at the once great estate of Saxenburg.

WILBUR SMITH
Birds of prey
This is an exciting tale of a swashbuckler and his son lying in wait on the coast of South Africa in 1667. They encounter adventure, war, and romance while anticipating a ship owned by a Dutch trading company.

MARIA THOMAS
Antonia saw the Oryx first
When the other British colonial families leave newly independent Tanzania, Dr. Antonia Redmond, Africa-born and Harvard-trained, remains behind with one of the African patients.

MUSTAPHA TLILI
Lion mountain
This is the life story of a Tunisian woman struggling to maintain the integrity of her ancestral land during the French occupation and colonial rule.

MYSTERIES

ELSPETH HUXLEY
African poison murders
In Chania, East Africa, Policeman Vachell keeps an eye on the detested German, Karl Munson, before Munson is murdered.

JAMES McCLURE
The artful egg
The contemporary South African scene in all its crazy racist contradictions is the setting for McClure's mystery about the Afrikaans detective Kramer and his black assistant Zondi. They are investigating the murders of two white women, both of which, inevitably, involve political as well as domestic considerations.

The Steam Pig
When a young music teacher is murdered, Lieutenant Kramer and Sergeant Zondi attempt to solve the case.

HENNING MANKELL
The white lioness
Inspector Wallander investigates the execution of a Swedish housewife, which uncovers a plot to assassinate Nelson Mandela and leads him into a tangle with the South African secret service.

MICHAEL PEARCE
Mingrelian conspiracy
In early twentieth-century Cairo, the Mamur Zapt Gareth Owen, Head of the Secret Police, races against time to uncover the culprits behind a series of violent threats and attacks on the city's popular cafés, especially with the proposed visit to Egypt of a Russian Grand Duke.

ELIZABETH PETERS
Serpent on the crown
This is the 17th entry in the bestselling series to feature Egyptologist Amelia Peabody Emerson and her extended family. When Amelia and her eminent archeologist husband learn of a mysterious death that has been attributed to a curse, a situation that enables them to enter the banned Valley of the Kings in order to return a stolen statue.

LYNDA ROBINSON
Murder at the feast of rejoicing
In Egypt's 18th dynasty, Lord Meren tries to solve a murder at a country house while his adopted son attempts to protect Tutankhamen.

ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH
Full cupboard of life
The runaway No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, set in Botswana, stars detective Mma Precious Ramotswe. Mma Ramotswe’s investigations expose the mysteries of the human heart far more than they do the wrongdoing of criminals. This time Ramotswe assists the self-made founder of a chain of hairdressing salons who wants to unearth the real intentions of her four suitors, each possibly more interested in her money than her heart. As fans know, though, sleuthing takes second place to folksy storytelling in McCall Smith's wry novels.
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