Kirkus Reviews Magazine’s current volume is special issue dedicated to the best books of the 21st century (so far) and features several African authors!

Over months, the magazine’s editors put together a list of 500 books total published in the U.S. between 2000 and 2024, 100 in each of the five categories: fiction, nonfiction, teens & YA, middle grade, and picture books.

Editor-in-chief Tom Beer’s introduction to the list frames it as reflective exercise of memory. The introduction opens with the provocation:

How do you recapture the past? You could flip through the pages of a photo album or old diary, or listen to an old playlist that evokes a particular time in your life. If you’re a hardcore reader, as I am, you might well scan your bookshelves and recall when and where you read certain titles.

As such, it appears that long-term impact on the American cultural sphere was a significant factor in determining which books were selected.

The list of 500 books included some familiar names for those of us interested in African literature.

The fiction list includes Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s international breakthrough novel Americanah (Knopf, 2013). The 2013 Kirkus review closes with the evocative lines “Will true love win out? Can things be fixed and contempt disarmed? All that remains to be seen, but for the moment, think of Adichie’s elegantly written, emotionally believable novel as a kind of update of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale.” Also on this list is Ethiopian-American author Dinaw Mengestu’s gorgeous All Our Names (Knopf, 2014), which the review praises: “Weighted with sorrow and gravitas, another superb story by Mengestu, who is among the best novelists now at work in America.”

American-Libyan novelist Hisham Matar’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Random House, 2016) is featured on the nonfiction list. Telling the story of Matar’s 2012 return to Libya following a three-decade exile, the book is praised as “A beautifully written, harrowing story of a son’s search for his father and how the impact of inexplicable loss can be unrelenting while the strength of family and cultural ties can ultimately sustain.”

On the teens & YA list is the first volume of the Legacy of Orisha series, Children of Blood and Bone (Henry Holt, 2018) by Nigerian-American writer Tomi Adeyemi, which was reviewed as “Powerful, captivating, and raw—Adeyemi is a talent to watch. Exceptional.” Also on the list is Sudanese-American author Safia Elhillo’s Home Is Not a Country (Make Me a World, 2021) which “Movingly unravels themes of belonging, Islamophobia, and the interlocking oppressions thrust upon immigrant women.”

Did you find more African authors on the Kirkus list? Let us know in the comments!