Ghanaian author Ayesha Harruna Attah is venturing into nonfiction for the first time. Bitter Sweet: The Story of West Africa Through the Kola Nut is forthcoming in the UK with Hurst Publishers in December 2026, and in North America with the University of North Carolina Press in the first semester of 2027. Blending history, travelogue, and cultural exploration, the book uses the kola nut as a lens through which to read West Africa — its trade routes, rituals, social life, and its relationship with the wider world. As Attah puts it, Bitter Sweet is an invitation into West Africa: after that first bitter bite of kola always comes sweetness.

For those who have followed Attah’s career closely, and we have been among her most enthusiastic chroniclers, this new direction feels like a natural evolution. The author of five novels, including The Hundred Wells of Salaga, a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, Attah has always been drawn to the deeper textures of West African history, culture, and womanhood. Her fiction has taken readers from the slave trade-era savannah of northern Ghana to the streets of New York, and through it all, the roots of West African identity have remained her abiding subject. Bitter Sweet simply makes that preoccupation explicit.

We first covered Attah when she opened an ice cream shop in Popenguine, Senegal, a reminder that she has always defied easy categorisation. We reported on the sale of the movie rights for her rom-com novel Zainab Takes New York in 2022. And we were thrilled to break the news that Booker Prize-winning British-Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo had selected her as a protégée for the 2023–24 cycle of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, one of the most prestigious mentorship programmes in the literary world, which has previously counted Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka among its mentors. Through that programme, Evaristo worked to help Attah gain wider readership and bring African stories to a global audience, a goal that Bitter Sweet, with its two major international publishers, seems well on its way to achieving.

Here is a description from the publisher:

The kola nut is a seed indigenous to West Africa, a seed that ancient caravan travellers chewed to survive their harsh desert journeys, the ‘Cola’ in Coca-Cola.

Bitter Sweet is an invitation into West Africa. Deeply involved in the lives of communities from Senegal to Cameroon, the kola nut has played a central role in customs, commerce and cuisine throughout the region’s vast, varied history. Searching for stories about this caffeine-rich seed as a way to better understand her West African home, acclaimed author Ayesha Harruna Attah takes readers along the Niger River, through the red sands of the Sahel and across the Atlantic Ocean. She traces her family’s roots in Ghana’s forests and savannah, where they were once kola traders and cultivators. In encounters with craftspeople, cultural custodians and descendants of enslaved people who travelled with kola to the Americas, she discovers what this unique commodity can tell us about West African identity and tradition—and about the region’s place in a messy, interconnected world. Along the way, she begins to fall in love with West Africa.

Blending history, travelogue and cultural exploration, Bitter Sweet shows us that after that first bitter bite of kola always comes sweetness.

Bitter Sweet is available for preorder now via Hurst Publishers. Preorder here.