The opening lines of Adedayo Agarau’s poetry chapbook The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020) goes: “broken every time the door opens/or is banged against your face/you can count your losses/but do you remember my name?” The poem is titled “look how far i’ve come,” and the reader will most likely pause after reading […]
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The Artistic Philosophy of Breaking and Becoming in Nnedi Okorafor’s Memoir | Reviews by Ainehi
“Before the incident,” Nnedi Okorafor writes, “I moved about the world with a sense of ease and entitlement.” This was spring 1993 during the early years of her studies in university. She’d hoped to one day become a scientist and an athlete, but spinal fusion surgery left her paralyzed from the waist down. “Quite suddenly […]
Book Review | Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s The Son of the House | Ikhide Ikheloa
You will love reading The Son of the House, Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s debut work of fiction. You put it down but it dares you to forget that it exists. You can’t. You always go back to it. The reader is haunted by its quiet dignity, the defiance of its story that insists on a narrative built […]
The Auditory Art of Storytelling in A Small Silence | Reviews by Ainehi
A Small Silence is the debut novel by Nigerian poet Jumoke Verissimo. The story is sad, funny, and inspiring all at once and introduces two of the most intriguing characters I have encountered in Nigerian fiction in a long while. Most importantly, the novel showed me how sound could heighten the emotional intensity of […]
Read an Exclusive Excerpt from Jumoke Verissimo’s A Small Silence
We are happy to share an exclusive excerpt from Jumoke Verissimo’s A Small Silence, which comes out on July 30. The novel tells an unusual story, one that readers will find delightfully surprising. Every day at 9 pm, a young woman named Desire visits an ex-prisoner named Prof. in his dark apartment (he likes the […]
The Poetics of the Outcast in Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King | Reviews by Ainehi
1 She Would Be King by Wayetu Moore takes me back to one of the most tragic characters in African literature. Unoka the father of Okonkwo. Unoka always had trouble fitting in. As a child, he roams village roads, singing to birds instead of learning to farm yams. He grows up to become the least […]
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