Book Reviews
Love, Loneliness, and the Chaos of Modern Womanhood: On Damilare Kuku’s Nearly All The Men in Lagos Are Mad
In Damilare Kuku’s Nearly All The Men in Lagos Are Mad, love is a battlefield fought in wigs, WhatsApp messages,
4 Minute
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
The Strange Elegance of Lolita
When Lolita was first published in America in 1958, it carried the scent of scandal like cheap perfume. Nabokov’s manuscript
6 Minute
Book Reviews
“In the Dream, Everything Speaks”: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and the Cost of Seeing Too Much
The first time I read The Famished Road, I didn’t really read it, I floated through it. I remember reaching
6 Minute
Book Reviews
Becoming in Full: Aiwanose Odafen’s Fearless Debut
In Tomorrow I Become a Woman, Aiwanose Odafen’s luminous debut novel, the act of “becoming” is less a rite of
9 Minute
Book Reviews
Swallowed by the System: Sefi Atta’s Stark Portrait of 1980s Nigeria
In Swallow, Nigerian novelist Sefi Atta takes us back to 1980s Lagos, not with nostalgia, but with the steady gaze
4 Minute
Book Reviews
Rereading Ama Ata Aidoo: The Wisdom and Fire of No Sweetness Here
I first read No Sweetness Here and Other Stories by Ama Ata Aidoo in 2005, tucked into a corner of
5 Minute
Book Reviews
The Grammar of Silence: On Kei Miller’s Things I Have Withheld
There are books that raise their voices in protest, and there are books that examine, with forensic precision, why so
6 Minute
Book Reviews
Ghosts of the Delta: On Chimeka Garricks’ Tomorrow Died Yesterday
There are novels that demand your attention with fireworks; plot twists, pyrotechnic prose, unrelenting spectacle. Tomorrow Died Yesterday is not
5 Minute
Book Reviews
Faith in a Minor Key: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom
There is a quiet tension at the heart of Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, that never quite resolves, a
6 Minute
Book Reviews
Dancing Between Worlds: On Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds
There’s a moment early in Small Worlds when Stephen, the book’s young narrator, steps into a dance circle at a
5 Minute
Book Reviews
A Room Full of Mirrors: Re-reading James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
There is a certain kind of silence that follows a book like Giovanni’s Room. It’s the silence that comes after
5 Minute
Book Reviews
Lineages of Silence and Speech: On Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones
In Ancestor Stones, Aminatta Forna constructs a memory palace from the scattered fragments of West African womanhood, opening its doors
6 Minute
Book Reviews
The Mirror and the Machete: Reading Our Sister Killjoy in a Fractured World
To read Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint today, nearly five decades after its
5 Minute
Book Reviews
Waking While Black: On Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count
In Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest offering, the Nigerian writer returns with the precise, humane intelligence that has defined
5 Minute
Book Reviews
In Between Lives: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Tender Study of Identity and Belonging
The Bengali-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri has made a quiet career of charting the interior landscapes of displacement. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning
5 Minute