The Scent of Burnt Flowers
The Scent of Burnt Flowers

Author: Blitz Bazawule

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2023-09-05

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0593496256

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Fleeing persecution in 1960s America, a Black couple seeks asylum in Ghana, but fresh dangers and old secrets threaten their newfound freedom in this hypnotic debut novel. “I am truly blown away by this novel.”—Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Red at the Bone ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: CrimeReads When the windshield of his Chevy Impala shatters in a dark diner parking lot in Alabama, Melvin moves without thinking. A split-second reaction marrows in his bones from the days of war, but this time it is the safety of his fiancé, Bernadette, at stake. Impulse keeps them alive, and yet they flee with blood on their hands. What is life like now that they are fugitives? Pack passports. Empty bank accounts. Set their old life on fire. The couple disguise themselves as a pastor and a reluctant pastor’s wife who’s hiding a secret from her fiancé. With a persistent FBI agent on their trail, they travel to Ghana to seek the help of Melvin’s old college friend who happens to be the country’s embattled president, Kwame Nkrumah. The couple’s chance encounter with Ghana’s most beloved highlife musician, Kwesi Kwayson, who’s on his way to perform for the president, sparks a journey full of suspense, lust, magic, and danger as Nkrumah’s regime crumbles around them. What was meant to be a fresh start quickly spirals into chaos, threatening both their relationship and their lives. Kwesi and Bernadette’s undeniable attraction and otherworldly bond cascades during their three-day trek, and so does Melvin’s intense jealousy. All three must confront one another and their secrets, setting off a series of cataclysmic events. Steeped in the history and mythology of postcolonial West Africa at the intersection of the civil rights movement in America, this gripping and ambitious debut merges political intrigue, magical encounters, and forbidden romance in an epic collision of morality and power.

Out of Darkness, Shining Light
Out of Darkness, Shining Light

Author: Petina Gappah

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1982110341

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A powerful, moving, and revelatory novel set in nineteenth-century Africa--the captivating story of the loyal men and women who carried the body of explorer and missionary David Livingstone from Zambia to Zanzibar so that his remains could be returned home to England. Dawn, 1 May 1873, on the outskirts of Chitambo's village, near Lake Bangweulu in modern-day Zambia. The Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone has died. He had been heading south in the African interior on an increasingly maniacal mission to penetrate the greatest secret of Victorian exploration. He wanted to find the source of the world's longest river, the Nile. Instead, on an isolated and swampy floodplain, Dr. Livingstone found his death. How Livingstone is to be buried will be decided by his African companions, a group of sixty-nine men, women, and children. They decide that come what may, Livingstone, his papers and maps, must all be carried to England. They bury his heart and other organs under a tree and dry his flesh like jerky in the sun. Over nine months, battling severe illness and hunger, hostile chiefs and unknown terrain, all while taking a tortuous route of more than 1,000 miles to the coast to avoid marauding slave traders, they march with Livingstone's body and the evidence of his explorations. Their journey has been called "the most extraordinary story in African exploration." In this novel, their story is retold anew in the distinct, indelible voices of Livingstone's sharp-tongued female cook, Halima; a repressed, formerly enslaved African missionary named Jacob Wainwright; and the collective voice of the retainers. The result is a profound and tragic journey--an epic like no other--that encompasses all of the hypocrisy of slavery and colonization while celebrating resilience, loyalty, and love. In Out of Darkness, Shining Light, Petina Gappah has created an ambitious and artful masterpiece.

Igifu
Igifu

Author: Scholastique Mukasonga

Publisher: Archipelago

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 1939810787

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The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. From the National Book Award finalist who Zadie Smith says, "rescues a million souls from the collective noun genocide." Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba's mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival. Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Author: Noor Naga

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2022-04-12

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1644451719

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Winner of the 2022 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Shortlisted for the 2022 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, a lush experimental novel about love as a weapon of empire. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants “returning” to a country she’s never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire—for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other—takes a violent turn that neither of them expected. A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga’s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?

The Forgetting Flower
The Forgetting Flower

Author: Karen Hugg

Publisher:

Published: 2020-04

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9781949116342

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Secrets and half-truths. These litter Renia Baranczka's past, but the city of Paris had offered an escape and the refuge of her dream job. The specialty plant shop kept her busy, but also had brought her to a new friend, Alain. His presence buffered the guilt that kept her up at night, dwelling on the endless replays of what happened to her sister. All too suddenly, the City of Light seems more sinister when Alain turns up dead. His demise threatens every secret Renia holds dear, including the rare plant hidden in the shop's tiny nook. It emits a special fragrance that can erase a person's memory--and perhaps much more than that. As Renia races to figure out the extent of the plant's powers, she's confronted by figures from her past who offer a proposal she can't outright refuse. Bit by bit, she descends into a menacing underworld of black market mobsters, navigating threats and fending off abuse to protect the safe peaceful life she's worked so hard for in Paris. Desperate to outwit her enemies, Renia maneuvers carefully, knows one wrong move will destroy not only the plant, but the lives of her and her sister.

How to Cook Your Husband the African Way
How to Cook Your Husband the African Way

Author: Calixthe Beyala

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780907633365

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The heroine falls in love with mysterious Bolobolo and attempts to win his love by preparing a variety of wonderful dishes for him. The novel is peppered throughout with recipes.

Bed of Flowers
Bed of Flowers

Author: Erin Satie

Publisher: Little Phrase

Published: 2018-06-19

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1942457111

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Bonny Reed is beautiful, inside and out. A loyal friend and loving daughter, she's newly engaged to her small town's most eligible bachelor. She's happy for herself--but mostly for her family, who need the security her marriage will bring. An old enemy shatters her illusions. First Baron Loel cost Bonny's family her fortune. Now he's insisting that her fiancé has hidden flaws, secrets so dark that--if she believed him--she'd have to call off the wedding. How will she choose? When the truth comes out, Bonny will have to choose between doing what's right and what's easy. Between her family and her best friend. And hardest of all--between her honor and the love of a man who everyone wants her to hate.

The Belly of Paris
The Belly of Paris

Author: Émile Zola

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2023-12-27

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13:

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The Belly of Paris (Le Ventre de Paris) is the third novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, first published in 1873. It is a novel of the teeming life which surrounds the great central markets of Paris. The book was originally translated into English by Henry Vizetelly and published in 1888 under the title Fat and Thin. After Vizetelly's imprisonment for obscene libel the novel was one of those revised and expurgated by his son, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. The heroine is Lisa Quenu, a daughter of Antoine Macquart. She has become prosperous, and with prosperity her selfishness has increased. Her brother-in-law Florent had escaped from penal servitude in Cayenne and lived for a short time in her house, but she became tired of his presence and ultimately denounced him to the police. Émile Zola (1840 – 1902) was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France.

Woman of Light
Woman of Light

Author: Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Publisher: One World

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0525511342

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “dazzling, cinematic, intimate, lyrical” (Roxane Gay) epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West, from the author of the National Book Award finalist Sabrina & Corina “Sometimes you just step into a book and let it wash over you, like you’re swimming under a big, sparkling night sky.”—Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You A PHENOMENAL BOOK CLUB PICK AND AN AUDACIOUS BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Book Riot There is one every generation, a seer who keeps the stories. Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished, and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion. Written in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s singular voice, the wildly entertaining and complex lives of the Lopez family fill the pages of this multigenerational western saga. Woman of Light is a transfixing novel about survival, family secrets, and love—filled with an unforgettable cast of characters, all of whom are just as special, memorable, and complicated as our beloved heroine, Luz. LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION

The Boy Who Stepped Through Time
The Boy Who Stepped Through Time

Author: Anna Ciddor

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1761061887

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An accidental trip back to the Roman Empire sets off a race against time to save a friendship - and a life. A thrilling time-slip adventure from a much-loved Australian author. When Perry steps into a crumbling ruin while on holiday in France, he is not expecting to be transported back 1700 years to Roman times. While he hunts desperately for a way home, he must blend in as a slave - even if it means eating mice for dinner! Gradually, Perry is caught up in the fascinating world of grand Villa Rubia and a life he could never have imagined. But when he makes a new friend, he thinks he might already know her terrible fate. Perry is faced with an impossible choice: to find his way home or stay and guard his friend's life - and risk being trapped in the past forever...