Global Fiction

A sparkling anthology of short stories featuring the first twenty winners of the Caine Prize, Africa's premier literary competition. This prestigious collection reflects the richness and diversity of African experience and features stories from Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uganda and Sierra Leone.

Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. It also interweaves Charlot's story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad (dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it). Ryad's no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop's self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man's mind.

Living in Ghana's capital city of Accra with a postgraduate degree and a career in data analysis, Esi Sekyi is a thoroughly modern African woman. Perhaps that is why she decides to divorce her husband after enduring yet another morning's marital rape. Though her friends and family are baffled by her decision (after all, he doesn't beat her!), Esi holds fast. When she falls in love with a married man—wealthy, and able to arrange a polygamous marriage—the modern woman finds herself trapped in a new set of problems.

Odidi Oganda, running for his life, is gunned down in the streets of Nairobi. His grief-stricken sister, Ajany, just returned from Brazil, and their father bring his body back to their crumbling home in the Kenyan drylands, seeking some comfort and peace. But the murder has stirred memories long left untouched and unleashed a series of unexpected events.

Inspired by real events, Horses of God follows four childhood friends growing up in a slum outside of Casablanca as they make the life-changing decisions that will lead them to become Islamist martyrs.

After 20 years of marriage, Rami discovers that her husband has been living a double—or rather, a quintuple—life. After Tony is forced to marry the four other women—as well as an additional lover—according to polygamist custom, the rival lovers join together to declare their voices and demand their rights.

A contemporary twist on the Odyssey, An Orchestra of Minorities is narrated by the chi, or spirit of a young poultry farmer named Chinonso. His life is set off course when he sees a woman who is about to jump off a bridge.

This is a novel in fourteen confections, and behind each cake lies a story. As Angel helps her customers in post-civil war Rwanda to work through their problems, they, in turn, help her to lay to rest the demons she has buried deep inside.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's searing and thought-provoking debut novel, Brotherhood takes place in the imaginary town of Kalep, where a fundamentalist Islamist government has spread its brutal authority. Under the regime of the so-called Brotherhood, two young people are publicly executed for having loved each other. In response, their mothers begin a secret correspondence, their only outlet for the grief they share and each woman's personal reckoning with a leadership that would take her beloved child's life.

A dozen years after his last visit, Jeebleh, accompanied by his journalist son-in-law, returns to his beloved Mogadiscio to see old friends. What greets them at first is not the chaos Jeebleh remembers, however, but an eerie calm enforced by ubiquitous white-robed figures bearing whips. Meanwhile, Malik's brother, Ahl, has arrived in Puntland, the region notorious as a pirates' base. Ahl is searching for his stepson, Taxliil, who has vanished from Minneapolis, apparently recruited by an imam allied to Somalia's rising religious insurgency. The brothers' efforts draw them closer to Taxliil and deeper into the fabric of the country, even as Somalis brace themselves for an Ethiopian invasion.

When Cathleen Harrington leaves her home in Ireland in 1919 to travel to South Africa, she knows that she does not love the man she is to marry there--her fiancé Edward, whom she has not seen for five years. Isolated and estranged in a small town in the harsh Karoo desert, her only real companions are her diary and her housemaid, and later the housemaid's daughter, Ada. Under Cathleen's tutelage, Ada grows into an accomplished pianist and a reader who cannot resist turning the pages of the diary, discovering the secrets Cathleen sought to hide. But in one night, everything changes, and Cathleen comes home from a trip to find that Ada has disappeared, scorned by her own community. Cathleen must make a choice: should she conform to society, or search for the girl who has become closer to her than her own daughter?

After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood—the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man—whom he has asked to look after his wife--in an unsettled and violent no-man's-land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.

Sidi, living a hermetic life as a bee whisperer, wakes one morning to find that something has attacked one of his beehives, brutally killing every inhabitant. Heartbroken, he soon learns that a mysterious swarm of vicious hornets committed the mass murder--but where did they come from, and how can he stop them? If he is going to unravel this mystery and save his bees from annihilation, Sidi must venture out into the village and then brave the big city and beyond in search of answers. Along the way, he discovers a country and a people turned upside down by their new post-Arab Spring reality as Islamic fundamentalists seek to influence votes any way they can on the eve of the country's first democratic elections.

Set during the last year of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin's brutal regime, Waiting exposes the fear and courage of a small, close-knit community uncertain of what the edicts of a madman and the marauding of his uncontrollable army will bring with each coming day. As Amin's war with Ugandan exiles and the Tanzanian army comes to an end, one family learns what it takes to survive and eventually to plan for a new life.

Salim has always believed that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. When glamorous Uncle Amir, now a senior diplomat, offers Salim an escape, the lonely teenager travels to London for college. But nothing has prepared him for the biting cold and seething crowds of this hostile city.

Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.