A continent of permanent revolution, of marauding rebels and despotic governments, yet one of love and laughter, compassion and humanity: this is the Africa of today. Nine-year-old Kimo, wide-eyed witness to its brutality, is starved out of his home village by drought. Desperate for help, he sets out for the big city of Bader in the company of his resourceful friends, the visionary Matt, pagmatic Hena and dreaming Golam. Their journey takes them through a country paralysed by the horrors of civil war, horrors which soon tighten their grip around the frail hopes of the starving foursome... Buoyed up by laughter, weighed down by tragedy and violence, My Friend Matt and Hena the Whore is an impossibly touching, quite extraordinary accomplishment. Views: 57
Desperate poachers are stalking the dwindling populations of Zimbabwe's great game parks. Ancient rivalries have ignited modern political ambitions and nothing is certain for those of the old Africa. But for Richard Dunn the stakes are even higher. Into his world comes the beautiful and compelling Steve Hayes, a woman struggling to guard her own dreadful secret. Richard has no choice: face the consequences of the past and fight for the future. To lose now is to lose everything. Views: 52
When a fourth corpse in three days washes up in Tangier with a bullet in the chest, Detective Laafrit knows this isn't just another illegal immigrant who didn't make it to the Spanish coast. The traffickers. The drug dealers. The smugglers. They know what it takes to get a gun into Morocco, and so does Laafrit. As his team hunts for the gun, Laafrit follows a hunch and reveals an international conspiracy to unlock the case. A fast-paced crime thriller from the Arab west. Views: 52
Hunger ached in her belly... the lioness slid forward as close as she dared. The little boy seconds away from death was two, maybe three years old. He was lost in the heat-soaked sand that was the Kalahari desert.Toddler Alex Theron is miraculously rescued by a passing clan of Kalahari Bushmen. Over the ensuing years, the desert draws him back, for it hides a beautiful secret... diamonds.But nothing comes easily from within this turbulent continent and before Alex can ever hope to realise his dreams he will lost his mind to love and fight a bitter enemy who will stop at nothing to destroy him. Views: 50
Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 Buttologist is down on his uppers. His girlfriend, Original Colour, has cleared out of their Paris studio and run off to the Congo with a vertically challenged drummer known as The Mongrel. She's taken their daughter with her. Meanwhile, a racist neighbour spies on him something wicked, accusing him of 'digging a hole in the Dole'. And his drinking buddies at Jips, the Afro-Cuban bar in Les Halles, pour scorn on Black Bazaar, the journal he keeps to log his sorrows. There are days when only the Arab in the corner shop has a kind word; while at night his dreams are stalked by the cannibal pygmies of Gabon. Then again, Buttologist wears no ordinary uppers. He has style, bags of it (suitcases of crocodile and anaconda Westons, to be precise). He's a dandy from the Bacongo district of Brazzaville - AKA a sapeur or member of the Society of Ambience-makers and People of Elegance. But is flaunting... Views: 47
All human beings, says an African legend, have an animal double. Some doubles are benign, others wicked. This legend comes to life in Alain Mabanckou's outlandish, surreal, and charmingly nonchalant Memoirs of a Porcupine.When Kibandi, a boy living in a Congolese village, reaches the age of 11, his father takes him out into the night and forces him to drink a vile liquid from a jar that has been hidden for years in the earth. This is his initiation. From now on, he and his double, a porcupine, become accomplices in murder. They attack neighbors, fellow villagers, and people who simply cross their path, for reasons so slight that it is virtually impossible to establish connection between the killings. As he grows older, Kibandi relies on his double to act out his grizzly compulsions, until one day even the porcupine balks and turns instead to literary confession.Winner of the Prix Renaudot, France's equal to the National Book Award, Alain Mabanckou is considered one... Views: 47
The whole of A Far- Off Place is charged with the power and magic and beauty of Africa. Driven with appalling violence from his home by "freedom fighters" François Joubert, a boy about to become a man, who is deeply learned in the life and ways of the bush, embarks on a long and terrible journey. He is accompanied by Nonnie, the young daughter of a retired colonial governor, murdered by the terrorists, Xhabbo, a dearly beloved Bushman whom François had once saved from death, and Xhabbo's wife, Nuin-Tara. Every effort is made by the attackers, swarming everywhere in the bush, to prevent the little foursome, sole survivors and witnesses of the brutal massacre of Europeans and their Matabele partners, from reaching the outside world. The sustained ferocity of the pursuit appears only too likely to overwhelm them, for François and Nonnie have only their own aristocratic spirit and faith in each other, the native skill of Xhabbo and Nuin- Tara and the courage and intelligence of... Views: 45
Waiting at the Paris airport, two immigrants from Djibouti reveal parallel stories of war, child soldiers, arms trafficking, drugs, and hunger. Bashir is recently discharged from the army and wounded, finding himself inside the French Embassy. Harbi, whose wife, Alice, has been killed by the police, is there too-arrested earlier as a political suspect. An embassy official mistakes Bashir for Harbi's son, and as Harbi does not deny it, both will be exiled to France, Alice's home country. This brilliantly shrewd and cynical universal chronicle of war and exile, translated into English for the first time, amounts to a lyrical and reflective history of Djibouti and its tortuous politics, crippled economy, and devastated moral landscape. Views: 42
In 1924, the irrepressibly curious Alberto Denti arrived in Libya to work in Italy's African colonies. With a natural ear for a story and a passionate interest in his work, he must have been as good a doctor as he was a writer. Though equally at home in an embassy or a brothel, Denti appears to have preferred the company of Berbers and Eritreans to that of his fellow Italians. He conjures up the dignity of local chieftains, the palpable charms of celebrated courtesans, the excitement of Tuareg entertainers and the love lost between himself and a wounded lion cub with all the charm of a man who boasted of the 'inestimable satisfactions known only to those who have lived in Africa'. Views: 41
LONG-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE A rollicking new novel described as "Oliver Twist in 1970s Africa" (Les Inrockuptibles) from "Africa's Samuel Beckett . . . one of the continent's greatest living writers" (The Guardian). It's not easy being Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. There's that long name of his for a start, which means, "Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors." Most people just call him Moses. Then there's the orphanage where he lives, run by a malicious political stooge, Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, and where he's terrorized by two fellow orphans—the twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala. But after Moses exacts revenge on the twins by lacing their food with hot pepper, the twins take Moses under their wing, escape the orphanage, and move to the bustling port town of Pointe-Noire, where they form a gang that survives on petty theft. What... Views: 38
'The poacher didn't shoot her. Bullets cost money and a shot might alert the rangers. . . On the third night, after enduring more agony than any man or beast should ever have to face, the rhinoceros took one last shuddering breath, heaved her flanks painfully, and sought refuge in the silky blackness of death.' In 1945, on a train bound for Zululand, two soldiers meet on the way home to their families, the war in Europe finally over. But in South Africa there are many more battles still to be fought. The seeds of apartheid are being sown in an angry nation, the fate of the Zulu people is as precarious as that of the endangered black rhinoceros, hunted for its horn. The soldiers on the train are already sworn enemies–one is black, the other white. Their sons, Michael King and Dyson Mpande, share a precious friendship that defies race and colour. But political greed, lust and a great evil between their families will test their friendship beyond imaginable limits. Views: 37
