By Agbonmire Ifeh

• Title: The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself
• Author: Penny Busetto
• Publisher: Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd
• Number of pages: 155
• Year of publication: 2014
• Category: Fiction

Penny Busetto’s The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself is an experimental fusion of literature and psychology – issues of memory, identity, self and existentialism are handled with sagacity. The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself is a divided into three parts: the first part is titled ‘Book of the Present’, the second part is ‘Book of Memory’ and the last part is ‘Book of the Future’. More…

By Emeka Ugwu

• Title: Melancholia
• Author: Dul Johnson
• Publisher: Sevhage Publishers
• Number of pages: 73
• Year of publication: 2014
• Category: Drama

‘The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership’. – Chinua Achebe

Melancholia is a play written by the Nigerian playwright Dul Johnson, who has been writing radio and television plays since the ‘80s, although at times under the pen name Jim Rogers. He is also a scholar who has held teaching positions at the University of Jos as well as National Film Institute, Jos. In a play that plumbs the depths of satire, the playwright tackles head-on the political scene in Nigeria, pre- and post-election, dramatising it in two acts with four and five scenes respectively. It is a play festooned with the physiological ideas of the ancients in such striking manner, the sort that most distinctively disentangles ‘the doctrine of the four temperaments’. More…

By Tọ́pẹ́ Salaudeen-Adégòkè

• Title: Masai Mara Adventures with Olê Ntutu
• Author: Gerald Kithinji
• Publisher: Morven Kester East Africa Limited
• Number of pages: 202
• Year of publication: 2015
• Category: Young Adult

There is an exigent situation that threatens the existence of animals. Rhinoceroses, elephants, lions have been under attack and their numbers are now drastically reduced. Recently, the saga of Cecil the lion, in Zimbabwe, hunted down and beheaded by an American tourist, roused fury and controversy internationally. And, that is just one case that got media attention – illegal hunting still goes on unreported. Already, the northern white rhinoceros is on the verge of extinction with only five left on the planet. More…

By Tinuke Adeyi

• Title: An Amber Scarf from Punjab
• Author: Laila Bouinidane
• Publisher: Top Press
• Number of pages: 95
• Year of publication: 2014
• Category: Fiction

‘…societies are different and what applies to one cannot automatically and easily apply to another because specificities of cultures are wildly disparate’ – Dya’e

An Amber Scarf from Punjab by Laila Bouinidane is a novella that strives to draw attention to the issues of religious tolerance, the quest for enlightenment, among others things, through a chronicle of the life of a young Moroccan woman. More…

By Richard Oduor Oduku

• Title: The Bottom of Another Tale
• Author: Su’eddie Vershima Agema
• Publisher: Sevhage Publishers
• Number of pages: 146
• Year of publication: 2014
• Category: Fiction

The Bottom of Another Tale is a veritable collection of twenty-six stories. Most are confident and moving, with unique and original characters, and a balance of character and plot. Most are intense and zesty, neatly wrought servings with different textures and flavours. It is a carefully considered collection. More…

By Su’eddie Vershima Agema

• Title: Born on a Tuesday
• Author: Elnathan John
• Publisher: Cassava Republic Press
• Number of pages: 263
• Year of publication: 2015
• Category: Fiction

‘For the boys who will never be known

And the girls who become numbers –

Stars without a name’

There are many people who think that Northern Nigeria has only the adherents of one religion, only the people of one ethnicity and that the experiences of one person is the experience of all in the region. Many times, the people of Northern Nigeria are thought of as just faces or, worse, numbers. Perhaps this is what informs Elnathan John’s book dedication in Born on a Tuesday, which is quoted above. More…

By Tunji Olalere

• Title: For Broken Men Who Cross Often
• Author: Efe Paul Azino
• Publisher: Kachifo Limited
• Number of pages: 70
• Year of publication: 2015
• Category: Poetry

‘This is for broken men who cross often,
fallen soldiers born on the narrow path,
with fire in their bellies now clients of the broad way
who don drooping shoulders and scatter
their treasures on the streets of good intentions’.

The spoken word poet, Efe Paul Azino, recently published his debut collection of poems. He also tucked an audio recording of eight of the poems into a pocket on the book’s inner back cover. For Broken Men Who Cross Often is a bold attempt to straddle two dizzying spheres of poetic expression in one squat. Expectedly, one or two tendons groan and tear. More…

By Emeka Ugwu

• Title: Season of Crimson Blossoms
• Author: Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
• Publisher: Parrésia Publishers Ltd
• Number of pages: 347
• Year of publication: 2015
• Category: Fiction

‘The correlation of melancholia and mourning seems justified by the general picture of the two conditions. Moreover, the exciting causes due to environmental influences are, so far as we can discern them at all, the same for both conditions’. – Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud

‘Nobody is questioned; nobody is questioning; the poet is absent. And the question involves no answer, or rather it is its own answer. Is it therefore a false question?’ – What Is Literature?, Jean-Paul Sartre

In what is arguably his most insightful work, Economic Agenda for Nigeria, published in 1992, Uchenna Nwankwo expatiates convincingly, in very modest but clear terms, on how Nigeria’s ‘bleak and desperate economic situation’, by and large, ‘has had serious implications for the nation’. More…

By Agbonmire Ifeh

• Title: The Peacekeeper’s Wife
• Author: Kevin Eze
• Publisher: Amalion Publishing
• Number of pages: 271
• Year of publication: 2015
• Category: Fiction

Kevin Eze’s The Peacekeeper’s Wife is a mesmerising account of war in another country and how it takes a toll on the family left behind. Narrated in the third person, it tells the tale of a war in the Congo and how peacekeepers are drafted from all over Africa to quench the raging fire devouring that land. Malika is the peacekeeper’s wife and, as would be expected given the book’s title, is the main character of the book. She is beautiful, vivacious and charismatic. Issa, Malika’s newly-wed husband, is drafted to serve in a UN mission, leaving his charismatic wife behind, in Segol, with his father, Salif, his mother, Fatimata, his stepmother, Ami Colle, and his younger brother, Babacar. More…

By Kwabena Agyare Yeboah

• Title: London – Cape Town – Joburg
• Author: Zukiswa Wanner
• Publisher: Kwela Books
• Number of pages: 337
• Year of publication: 2014
• Category: Fiction

Zukiswa Wanner’s witty prose excites, unsettles and discomforts in shocking ways. It reminds the reader, in certain ways, of Ama Ata Aidoo’s prose, but Wanner’s prose is subtler and her work is richer than art that is directed solely at provoking the establishment. More…