Sefi Atta is back, and this time she’s bringing the aunties. The Soyinka Prize-winning author has announced The Gèlè Gang, a new novel arriving in February 2027, published by Interlink Books. The cover alone, a riot of green and cream geometric patterns in the spirit of Nigerian wedding fabrics, signals that this one is meant to be fun.

Atta describes the book as the first of her post-lockdown novels. Inspired by the Nigerian weddings she attended, she says it “looks and feels like lime sorbet”: light, sweet and tart, and a palate cleanser for the next course in her writing life. After the weight of recent work, including a human trafficking story in Good-for-Nothing Girl, that sounds like a welcome change of pace.

The novel follows a group of spirited fifty-something Nigerian American women in Atlanta. Their self-professed rational friend Yinka narrates how they tried to matchmake their twenty-something daughters. The plan did not go as expected, but the women ended up learning more about their daughters and about each other. Early readers describe a book about identity, belonging, and female friendship, delivered with wit and clear-sightedness.

The advance praise is already strong. Nikki May, author of Wahala, calls Atta’s observations on the lives of privileged Nigerian women in the diaspora “devastatingly accurate.” Chika Unigwe, author of The Middle Daughter and Grace, praises a “luminous” portrait of female friendships, and Foluso Agbaje, author of The Parlour Wife, calls it a witty, intimate look at first-generation Nigerian women juggling friendship, identity, and the intense cultural pressure for their children to marry well.

The Gèlè Gang adds to a body of work that has made Atta one of the leading voices in contemporary Nigerian fiction. Born in Lagos in 1964, she trained as a chartered accountant before turning to writing and earned her MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her debut novel, Everything Good Will Come (2005), won the inaugural Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa in 2006. Her short story collection Lawless, published in the US and UK as News from Home, won the 2009 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. Her earlier honors include PEN International’s David TK Wong Prize and a Caine Prize shortlist.

Her novels include Swallow (2010), A Bit of Difference (2013), The Bead Collector (2019), The Bad Immigrant, and Good-for-Nothing Girl (2024). Her recent Indigene (2025) pairs a novella, a sequel to Everything Good Will Come that finds Enitan turning sixty, with short stories. Atta is also a playwright and screenwriter: her radio plays have aired on the BBC, her stage plays have been performed internationally, and she co-wrote the 2021 Netflix adaptation of Swallow with Kunle Afolayan. She was a juror for the 2010 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and a judge for the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing.

Read the synopsis below:

Sefi Atta strikes a conversational tone in this lighthearted novel about a group of spirited fifty-something Nigerian American women in Atlanta. Yinka, their self-professed rational friend, gives an account of how they tried to matchmake their twenty-something daughters, didn’t get the results they expected, but discovered more about their daughters and each other.

With incredible wit, humor, and clear-sightedness, Sefi Atta has given us a brilliant novel about identity, belonging, and female friendships.

The Gèlè Gang is available for preorder on Amazon.