61 Anticipated African Books of 2023

by Alesia Alexander

January 09, 2023

2023 is going to be a very special year for lovers of African books. So many exciting titles! The 61 books on the list cover a range of genres—from short story collections to historical fiction to YA fantasy and science fiction, in addition to memoir and children’s books, and more. We recommend that you use the list to plan out your 2023 reading experience. Follow this link for ideas on how to make a reading calendar/journal. Everyone will be talking about these books on social media. You DO NOT want to miss out on the conversation.

In the comment section, tell us which book you are most eager to read.

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NOTE:

This list is not exhaustive. There are tons of books that we did not include because we didn’t have all the publisher info. The best way to stay up to date with new books throughout the year is subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Instagram here.
All book descriptions are excerpted from the publisher’s synopsis.
Not all the “BUY” links are live or go to pre-order or buy pages. This is because this info is simply not available. We will updated as pre-order and buy links become available.

Happy Reading!

The Cabal

The Cabal

Bako Thomas lives a solitary life, a calm centre in an increasingly unstable world. The City outside his apartment is sliding towards a dystopia as a fuel crisis holds citizens to ransom. When a tragedy forces him to go on the run, he soon finds himself being roped into the murky world of politics and corruption he thought he had left behind for good. (Masobe)

The Middle Daughter

The Middle Daughter

310 pages

When seventeen-year-old Nani loses her older sister and then her father in quick succession, her world spins off its axis. Isolated and misunderstood by her grieving mother and sister, she’s drawn to an itinerant preacher, a handsome self-proclaimed man of God who offers her a new place to belong. (UK: Canongate; US: Dzanc/2023)

The Last Gift of the Master Artists

The Last Gift of the Master Artists

384 pages

A boy and a girl meet by chance on a riverbank in Africa. One is the son of a king, struggling to find his place in the world, the other the daughter of a craftsman from the secretive tribe of master artists. The prince, entranced, stays hidden in the bushes. The girl, knowing nothing of him but his voice, agrees to meet again. When she fails to appear the next day, he begins to search for her, tracing her at last to her village where, disguised as an apprentice, he finds a place in her father’s workshop. But this is no fairy tale. A strange wind has begun to blow, and in its wake, things are disappearing: songs, stories, artworks, and finally, people. Beautiful ships with white sails are glimpsed on the horizon…(Apollo, Other/2023)

Call and Response

Call and Response

304 pages

The stories collected in Call and Response are strongly anchored in place - in the village of Serowe, where the author is from, and in Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana – charting the emotional journeys of women seeking love and opportunity beyond the barriers of custom and circumstance. (Viking/2023)

The Language of Languages

The Language of Languages

116 pages

For decades now, Ngũgĩ has been translating his Gikũyũ works into English himself, and he has used many platforms to champion the practice and cause of literary translations, which he calls “the language of languages.” This volume brings together for the first time Ngũgĩ’s essays and lectures about translation, written and delivered over the past two decades. (Seagull Books/2023)

The Animals of My Earth School

The Animals of My Earth School

96 pages

In the compassionate, playful, fable-like poems of The Animals of My Earth School, Mildred Kiconco Barya awakens us to the vividly singing, fully alive, non-human communities surrounding us. These poems demonstrate poetry’s unique ability to prick us from our self-involved numbness and awaken us to wonder. (Terrapin/2023)

All That It Ever Meant

All That It Ever Meant

192 pages

Mati’s family is reeling from the death of Mati’s mother. Her Baba has drawn into himself, her sister Chichi is rebelling, and her young brother Tana is desperate for love and normalcy. When Chichi pulls her worst stunt yet, Baba uproots the family from their home in England for an extended camping holiday in their native Zimbabwe. Along for the trip is Meticais, a fabulously attired gender-neutral spirit who only Mati can see and converse with. (US: Norton; Nigeria: Ouida/2023)

Strange and Difficult Times: Notes on a Global Pandemic

Strange and Difficult Times: Notes on a Global Pandemic

224 pages

Strange and Difficult Times is a new essay collection looking at the biases, assumptions and moral failures in Western responses (both individual and collective, psychological and practical) to the 'crises' of the early twenty-first century. Nanjala Nyabola focusses on the big crisis of the current moment, Covid-19, and the world that it may leave in its wake. (Hurst)

Mama’s Sleeping Scarf

Mama’s Sleeping Scarf

32 pages

The first children’s book from the best-selling author of We Should All Be Feminists and Americanah—a tender story about a little girl’s love for her mother’s scarf, and the adventures she shares with it and her whole family. With stunning illustrations from Joelle Avelino, Mama’s Sleeping Scarf is a celebration of family, and a touching story about the everyday objects that remind us of the ones we love. (Knopf/2023)

The Lies of the Ajungo

The Lies of the Ajungo

96 pages

In the City of Lies, they cut out your tongue when you turn thirteen, to appease the terrifying Ajungo Empire and make sure it continues sending water. Tutu will be thirteen in three days, but his parched mother won’t last that long. So Tutu goes to his oba and makes a deal: she provides water for his mother, and in exchange he will travel out into the desert and bring back water for the city. Thus begins Tutu’s quest for the salvation of his mother, his city, and himself. (Tor/2023)

Bloomer

Bloomer

292 pages

Fully early pandemic “locked down” in an old age home, 70-year-old boomer, Maggie, ditches her bra, browses an old diary and reconnects with her artist self. While the world is happier with its oldies locked away, the lovable and maverick elders of Hazyview Mansions, galvanised by Maggie and her four close friends, have their own ideas. Romance, old loves; individual, local and global issues drive the story of this consequential movement with sustained and gentle humour. (Modjaji/2023)

Don’t Answer When They Call Your Name

Don’t Answer When They Call Your Name

In her latest novel, Ukamaka Olisakwe blends myths and magic to introduce readers to an enchanting, spectral world where a young girl and her dog must change the destiny of an ill-fated community. Don’t Answer When They Call Your Name is an extraordinary novel bursting with kaleidoscopic worlds and beings. It is a feat of the imagination from a born storyteller.

A Spell of Good Things

A Spell of Good Things

352 pages

Eniola is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. Because his father has lost his job, Eniola spends his days running errands for the local tailor, collecting newspapers, begging when he must, dreaming of a big future. Wuraola is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family. When a local politician takes an interest in Eniola and sudden violence shatters a family party, Wuraola’s and Eniola’s lives become intertwined. (Canongate/Knopf/2023)

Daughters of Oduma

Daughters of Oduma

368 pages

An elite female fighter must reenter the competition to protect her found family of younger sisters in this scintillating young adult fantasy inspired by West African culture, perfect for fans of The Gilded Ones and Creed. This is the life of the girls who compete in the Isle’s elite, all-female fighting sport of Bowing. (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/2023)

Dazzling

Dazzling

352 pages

Treasure and Ozoemena must reckon with their burgeoning wildness and the legacy of their fathers’ decisions, Ozoemena’s fellow students at her new boarding school start to vanish. Treasure and Ozoemena will face terrible choices as each must ask herself: in a world that always says ‘no’ to women, what must two young girls sacrifice to get what is theirs? (UK: Hachette; US: Overlook Press/2023)

River Spirit

River Spirit

400 pages

Through the voices of seven men and women whose fates grow inextricably linked, Aboulela’s latest novel illuminates a fraught and bloody reckoning with the history of a people caught in the crosshairs of imperialism. River Spirit is a powerful tale of corruption, coming of age, and unshakeable devotion – to a cause, to one’s faith, and to the people who become family. (Grove Press/2023)

Shubeik Lubeik

Shubeik Lubeik

528 pages

A brilliantly original debut graphic novel that imagines a fantastical alternate Cairo where wishes really do come true. Shubeik Lubeik—a fairy tale rhyme that means “your wish is my command” in Arabic—is the story of three people who are navigating a world where wishes are literally for sale. (Pantheon/2023)

The Three of Us

The Three of Us

192 pages

Long-standing tensions between a husband, his wife, and her best friend finally come to a breaking point in this sharp domestic comedy of manners, told brilliantly over the course of one day. At once subversively comical, wildly astute, and painfully compulsive, The Three of Us explores cultural truths, what it means to defy them, and the fine line between compromise and betrayal. (G.P. Putnam Sons/2023)

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa

336 pages

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa announces a dazzling, distinctive, new literary voice. Crackling with energy, this tragicomic novel provides a stunning lens into contemporary African life, the complicity of the West, and the impossible challenges of coming of age in a turbulent world. (Bloomsbury/2023)

Daughter in Exile

Daughter in Exile

400 pages

Lola is twenty-one, and her life in Senegal couldn't be better. An aspiring writer and university graduate, she has a great job, a nice apartment, a vibrant social life, and a future filled with possibility. But fate disrupts her world when she falls for Armand, an American Marine stationed at the U.S. Embassy. Her mother, a high court judge in Ghana, disapproves of her choice, but nothing will stop Lola from boarding a plane for Armand and America. (HarperVia/2023)

Rose and the Burma Sky

Rose and the Burma Sky

272 pages

In Rose and the Burma Sky, Rosanna Amaka weaves together the realities of war, the pain of first love and how following your heart might not always be the best course of action. Its gritty boy's-eye view brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power. (Doubleday/2023)

The Institute for Creative Dying

The Institute for Creative Dying

Five strangers – a model, a former nun, a couple in crisis, and an offender newly released from prison – have come here, to this place, to discover an end to life as they’ve known it. Placing their trust in their hosts, the Mortician and Mustafa, the five open their minds and bodies to an alternative experience. Not all of them will survive – or at least not in the way they imagined – but all of them will be shown the limits of their living. (Pan Macmillan SA)

Lucky Girl

Lucky Girl

336 pages

Longing for independence, a young sheltered Kenyan woman flees the expectations of her mother for a life in New York City that challenges all her beliefs about race, love, and family. Lucky Girl is a fierce and tender debut about the lives and loves we choose–what it meant to be an African immigrant in America at the turn of the millennium, and how a young woman finds a place for herself in the world. (Dial/2023)

I Am Still With You

I Am Still With You

240 pages

In inimitable, rhythmic prose, the author and winner of the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize Emmanuel Iduma tells the story of his return to Nigeria, where he grew up, after years of living in New York. He traveled home with an elusive mission: to learn the fate of his uncle Emmanuel, his namesake, who disappeared in the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s. (Algonquin/2023)

Forged by Blood

Forged by Blood

400 pages

In the midst of a tyrannical regime and political invasion, Dèmi just wants to survive: to avoid the suspicion of the nonmagical Ajes who occupy her ancestral homeland of Ife; to escape the King’s brutal genocide of her people—the darker skinned, magic wielding Oluso; and to live peacefully with her secretive mother while learning to control the terrifying blood magic that is her birthright. (Voyager/2023)

Caged Ocean Dub

Caged Ocean Dub

273 pages

There are dragons in Lagos and witches who wear their sons’ skins, while an alliance of otherworldly beings are collecting intelligent life forms in the depths of the universe. Falowo’s poetically precise language and spine-tingling plot twists are reminiscent of both Poe and Kafka as they tackle themes of belonging, abusive maternal relationships, and tragic love in an unforgettable literary adventure. (Android/2023)

The Night Before Eid: A Muslim Family Story

The Night Before Eid: A Muslim Family Story

40 pages

On the night before Eid, it’s finally time to make special sweet treats...Together with Mama and Teita, Zain follows his family’s recipe and brings to life Eid songs and prayers, pharaonic history, and the melodies and tastes of his Egyptian heritage. (Christy Ottaviano/2023)

Riambel

Riambel

160 pages

In Riambel, Priya Hein invites us to protest, to rail against longstanding structures of class and ethnicity. She shows us a world of natural enchantment contrasted with violence and the abuse of power. This seemingly simple tale of servitude, seduction and abandonment blisters with a fierce sense of injustice. (Indigo/2023)

Last Seen in Lapaz

Last Seen in Lapaz

360 pages

Accra private investigator Emma Djan’s continues to solve missing person cases with panache in this novel. When a whirlwind romance leads to a brutal murder and the disappearance of a young Nigerian woman, PI Emma Djan resorts to dangerous undercover work to track her down in Accra. (Soho Crime/2023).

Drinking from Graveyard Wells

Drinking from Graveyard Wells

160 pages

Ndlovu assembles poignantly reflective stories that center the voices of African women charting their own Black history through the ages. Ndlovu's stories play with genre, from softly surreal to deeply fantastical. Each narrative is wrapped in the literary eloquence and tradition of southern African mythology. (University Press of Kentucky/2023)

The Longest Summer

The Longest Summer

264 pages

Abboton, IN has kept hard-partying Victor Adewale in the closet for his entire life. So he makes a deal with his stern Nigerian father: Clean up his act, hold down a job, and the dad will pay for him to attend grad school in New York. Easy enough, until $10,000 goes missing from Victor’s Hot Topic-esque mall store under his watch, leaving him the prime suspect. (Clash/2023)

there’s more

there’s more

88 pages

Giving voice to the experiences of migrant and other marginalized citizens whose lives society tends to overlook, this collection challenges the oppressive systems that alienate us from one another and the land. Carefully built lyric meditations combine beauty and ugliness, engaging with violence, and displacement, while seeking to build kinship and celebrate imagination. (U of Alberta P/2023)

War Widow

War Widow

432 pages

Sloane is distraught when she reaches Ilé-Orisha – the Shadow Rebels’ hidden fortress. She was hoping to “rally the rebels in a war against her father, Theodus Sol, the new Seer King,” but “Sloane stumbles into a massacre, ordered by Theodus himself.” (HarperTeen/2023)

Small Worlds

Small Worlds

253 pages

Set over the course of three summers, Small Worlds follows Stephen, a first-generation Londoner born to Ghanaian immigrant parents, brother to Ray, and best friend to Adeline. On the cusp of big life changes, Stephen feels pressured to follow a certain path—a university degree, a move out of home—but when he decides instead to follow his first love, music, his world and family fractures in ways he didn’t foresee. (Viking; Grove/2023)

The History of a Difficult Child

The History of a Difficult Child

400 pages

As Selam’s mother, the powerful and relentlessly dignified Degitu, grows ill, she embraces a persecuted, Pentecostal God and insists her family convert alongside her. The Asmelashes stand solidly in opposition to the times, and Selam grows up seeking revenge on despotic comrades, neighborhood bullies, and a ruthless God. (Viking/2023)

Chain Gang All Stars

Chain Gang All Stars

384 pages

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. (Pantheon/2023)

No One Dies Yet

No One Dies Yet

384 pages

As Black diasporans around the world make the pilgrimage to West Africa during The Year of Return, three African-American friends join in the festivities to explore Ghana’s colonial past and its underground queer scene. They are thrust into the hands of two guides, Kobby and Nana, whose intentions aren’t clear. An unsettling tale of murder in a country whose dead slaves are shackled with stories that must be heard. (Europa/2023)

Nightbloom

Nightbloom

352 pages

A riveting depiction of class and family in Ghana, a compelling exploration of memory, and an eye-opening story of life as an African-born woman in the US, Nightbloom is above all a gripping and beautifully written novel attesting to the necessity of female bonds in the face of societies that would silence them. This assured follow-up to Peace Adzo Medie’s much-heralded debut is perfect for readers of The Girl with the Louding Voice, Americanah, and Of Women and Salt. (Algonquin/2023)

To Write the Africa World

To Write the Africa World

318 pages

In October 2016, thirty intellectuals and artists from Africa, its diasporas, and beyond gathered together in Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal, to reflect on the present and future of Africa in the midst of transformations that are sweeping through the contemporary world. This book brings together and makes available to the English-speaking world the material presented at the workshop. (Polity/2023)

When We Were Fireflies

When We Were Fireflies

420 pages

When brooding artist, Yarima Lalo, encounters a moving train for the first time, two serendipitous events occur. First, it triggers memories of past lives in which he was twice murdered—once on a train. He also meets Aziza, a woman with a complicated past of her own, who becomes key to helping him understand what he is experiencing. With a third death in his current life imminent, together they go hunting for remnants of his past lives. (Masobe/2023)

Ghost Season

Ghost Season

320 pages

Weaving a sweeping history of the breakup of Sudan into the lives of these captivating characters, Fatin Abbas explores the porous and perilous nature of borders―whether they be national, ethnic, or religious―and the profound consequences for those who cross them. Ghost Season is a gripping, vivid debut that announces Abbas as a powerful new voice in fiction. (Norton/2023)

Sons of the East

Sons of the East

396 pages

Jasper’s young widow, as custom demands, must now choose one of his brothers as surrogate spouse. Another battle ensues, this time for the hand of the delectable Amata. At first, the widow declines to shack up with her husband’s traducers. However, on the insistence of her in-laws and prodded by the Okonkwo matriarch, she finally makes her choice. (Griot's Lounge/2023)

No Edges

No Edges

144 pages

The first collection of Swahili fiction in English translation, No Edges introduces eight East African writers from Tanzania and Kenya as they share tales of sorcerers, Nairobi junkyards, cross-country bus rides, and spaceships that blast prisoners into eternity. Through language bursting with rhythm and vivid Africanfuturist visions, these writers summon the boundless future into being. (Two Lines/2023)

Relations

Relations

464 pages

This vital anthology is Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond’s striking vision of a meeting place of perspectives, centered in the African and diaspora experience. In a post-Black Panther world, it is an urgent and welcome embrace of the diversity of Blackness. (Harper Via)

House Woman

House Woman

314 pages

When Ikemefuna is put on a plane from Lagos to Texas, she anticipates her newly arranged All-American life: a handsome husband, a beautiful red-brick mansion in Sugar Land, pizza parlors, and dance classes. An unforgettably delicious thriller, Adorah Nworah's debut is about a woman trapped in a dangerous web of secrets and desires melting in the Texas heat. (The Unnamed Press/2023)

Ada’s Room

Ada’s Room

352 pages

A woman in 15th century West Africa named Ada buries her child and confronts a Portuguese enslaver. A woman in Victorian England named Ada Lovelace, a mathematical genius and computer programming pioneer, tries to hide her affair with Charles Dickens from her husband. A woman named Ada, imprisoned in a concentration camp at Mittelbau-Dora in 1945, will survive one more day in enforced prostitution. Connected by an unknown but sentient spirit, and a bracelet of fertility beads that three different women across time named Ada encounters at a pivotal moment in her life, these women share a name and a purpose. (Riverhead/2023)

Maame

Maame

320 pages

Smart, funny, and deeply affecting, Jessica George's Maame deals with the themes of our time with humor and poignancy: from familial duty and racism, to female pleasure, the complexity of love, and the life-saving power of friendship. Most important, it explores what it feels like to be torn between two homes and cultures―and it celebrates finally being able to find where you belong. (St. Martin's Press/2023)

Fat Off Fat On

Fat Off Fat On

264 pages

Fat Off, Fat On: A Big Bitch Manifesto is a humorous, at times tragic, memoir that follows Kent on her journey to realizing that her body is a gift to be grown into, that sometimes family doesn’t always mean home, and how even ill-fated bisexual romances could free her from gender essentialism. (Feminist Press/2023)

The Widow Who Died With Flowers In Her Mouth

The Widow Who Died With Flowers In Her Mouth

352 pages

Ordinary people find, and fashion themselves into and within far-from-ordinary situations: A beautiful woman’s half-naked body is discovered to the shock of her community; but is the killer one of her wealthy suitors? A young doctor reaches the edge of sanity after a forbidden entanglement with a married woman. All these stories and more are in Udenwe's debut short story collection. (Masobe/2023)

Mass for Shut-Ins

Mass for Shut-Ins

120 pages

Venturing through dreamscapes, hellscapes, and lurid landscapes, poems map speculative fields of spiritual warfare. This collection is controlled chaos powered by nightmare fuel. It animates an utterly odd organism: a cosmology cobbled with scripture, superstition, mass media, mad science. Horrid, holy, unholy—these pages overrun with the unhinged, intrusive thoughts that obsess us all late into nighttime. (Yale UP/2023)

What Napoleon Could Not Do

What Napoleon Could Not Do

368 pages

When siblings Jacob and Belinda Nti were growing up in Ghana, their goal was simple: to move to America. For them, the United States was both an opportunity and a struggle, a goal and an obstacle. Jacob wants a visa so he can move to Virginia to live with his wife—a request that the U.S. government has repeatedly denied. He envies his sister, Belinda, who achieved, as their father put it, “what Napoleon could not do”: she went to college and law school in the United States and even managed to marry Wilder, a wealthy Black businessman from Texas. America is seen through the eyes and ambitions of these three characters in this gripping novel. (Riverhead/2023)

My Life as a Chameleon

My Life as a Chameleon

254 pages

My Life as a Chameleon is a powerful story of resilience and belonging, about family secrets and how they can destroy even the deepest bonds. It is a story about finding your place in the world and realizing you deserve to be there. (Atom)

The Splinter in the Sky

The Splinter in the Sky

384 pages

A diverse, exciting debut space opera about a young tea expert who is taken as a political prisoner and recruited to spy on government officials—a role that may empower her to win back her nation’s independence—perfect for fans of N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor. (Saga/2023)

Watch Us Dance

Watch Us Dance

336 pages

The rebellions within an interracial family play out against the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s in this sexy, stylish, sophisticated new novel by the award-winning, internationally bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny and In the Country of Others. In Watch Us Dance, Leila Slimani draws on her family’s inspiring story to craft a bold, powerful chronicle of the relentless human quest for freedom and self-knowledge. (Viking/2023)

Madonna is Our Mother: Notes from Malawi

Madonna is Our Mother: Notes from Malawi

In the collection of 15 essays, Muti Michael Phoya reflects on the shifting character of postcolonial Malawi. Focusing mainly on the land and memory, the book paints a nuanced picture of a modern African country through its fascinating history. (Logos Open Culture)

The Nigerwife

The Nigerwife

320 pages

Nicole Oruwari has the perfect life: a handsome husband, a palatial house in the heart of glittering Lagos, and a glamorous group of friends. She left gloomy London and a troubled family past behind for sunny, moneyed Lagos, becoming part of the Nigerwives—a community of foreign women married to Nigerian men. But when Nicole disappears without a trace after a boat trip, the cracks in her perfect life start to show. (Atria; Masobe/2023)

Azucar

Azucar

172 pages

Azúcar (sugar) is a novel about belonging in a world where all things are on the move: people, ideas, foods and not least music. Oswald Kole Osabutey Jnr, henceforth Yunior, leaves his family in Accra to travel to the mythical Caribbean island of Fumaz (think tobacco) where the revolutionary philosophy of peopleism just about keeps its flame alive against the forces of an old-style command centre political bureaucracy and a stifling trade blockade. (Peepal Tree/2023)

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Insha Allah

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Insha Allah

224 pages

At the beginning of the Coronavirus outbreak, what was supposed to be a long-awaited homecoming becomes a desperate adventure escaping border guards and surviving on candy bars, all the while trying to avoid losing her cool with unwanted and unlikely traveling companions. (Feral House)

Rootless

Rootless

368 pages

Rootless is a heartrending love story about motherhood and sacrifice, providing an intimate look at what happens after a marriage collapses, leading two people to rediscover what they ultimately want—and if it’s still each other. As Efe says, “Love and regret aren’t mutually exclusive.” (Ballantine/2023)

Black Foam

Black Foam

224 pages

A chameleon, Dawoud—or David, Adal, or Dawit, depending on where and when you meet him—is not lost in this whirl of identities. In fact, he is defined by it. Dawoud’s journey is circuitous and specific, but the desire to belong is universal. Spellbinding to the final page, Black Foam is both intimate and grand in scale, much like the experiences of the millions of people migrating to find peace and safety in the twenty-first century. (Amazon/2023)

The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle

The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle

400 pages

Caught between Qozmos, the high wizard of Ethiopian magic, the larger-than-life Lord Sashvindu Samarasinghe, England’s Sorcerer Royal, and Scotland’s own Hamish Manas MacLeod, it’s up to Ropa (and Jomo and Priya) to sort through the dangerous secret politics and alliances to figure out what really happened. But she has a special tool―the many ghosts tied to the ancient, powerful castle. (Tor/2023)

The Finest Thief in the Kingdom

The Finest Thief in the Kingdom

240 pages

The collection's title, Min Qisas Alatfal, literally means Children's Tales, however these stories are far from your average bedtime read. They are socio-political tales told from a satirical and critical perspective. Naihoum writes about his native Libya, bringing to life a wonderful tableau of characters from Sultans and Faqihs to dervishes, thieves, and beggars. (Darf/2023)

Finding Folkshore

Finding Folkshore

16-year-old Fola Oduwole is scared. She’s scared of disappointing her parents, she’s scared of not being able to follow her dreams, but most of all she’s scared for her brother. He has cancer and his surgery’s coming up soon, it could leave him paralysed, or worse. Fola deserves a break, and she gets her wish when she takes the Victoria line one stop too far and is transported to Folkshore, a magical, hidden part of London. (Jacaranda)

anticipated books of 2023

Alesia Alexander | administrator

COMMENTS ( 2 ) -

Esther January 20, 2024 13:33

Amazing listing

Emeka Ifeanyi January 11, 2023 07:18

Beautiful. I thought chigozie obioma's road to the country will be published this year.

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