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Set during the final violent years of apartheid, following Toloki, a professional mourner, as he grieves at funerals across the townships. A magical, compassionate novel.

A lioness is killing women in a remote village. An outsider hunter and the village headman's daughter try to understand the attacks in this haunting exploration of colonial wounds and gendered violence.

Narrated by a gecko, the novel follows a man who forges identities for people who want to erase their pasts — in a country where everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war.

Based on the 1937 Parsley Massacre when Trujillo's forces killed tens of thousands of Haitian sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic. Amabelle survives and must find a way to live.

Narrated by the elderly Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the novel spans the history of Martinique from slavery through the shantytown of Texaco on the outskirts of Fort-de-France. A polyphonic explosion of Creole language.

Twelve characters — mostly Black British women — whose lives intersect in modern Britain. Evaristo's formally inventive prose-poetry creates a chorus of voices spanning generations and social classes.

Barry, a 74-year-old Antiguan man living in London, has been secretly in love with his best friend Morris for 60 years while maintaining his marriage and reputation. A joyful, heartbreaking novel.

Two Jamaican immigrants — Hortense and Gilbert — arrive in London in 1948 and rent a room from Queenie, a white woman whose husband has just returned from the war. A rich, humane novel about the Windrush generation.

Roy is wrongfully imprisoned shortly after his marriage to Celestial. The years of separation change both of them. A love story about mass incarceration, Black ambition, and what prison does to a people.

In antebellum Virginia, a free Black man owns slaves. After his death, his plantation unravels while the county sheriff — also a former slave — struggles to maintain order. A profound meditation on freedom and its perversions.

Tashi, a character from The Color Purple, agrees to undergo female genital mutilation as an act of African solidarity — and spends her life dealing with the physical and psychological consequences.

Four brothers in 1990s Nigeria sneak away to fish in a forbidden river, where a mad prophet tells the eldest that he will be killed by one of his brothers. A biblical, classical tragedy set in Obioma's childhood.

Ijeoma falls in love with a girl during the Biafran War. As Nigeria 'rebuilds,' she must navigate a society hostile to her sexuality while never forgetting what she survived and who she loves.

Dantala, a street boy in northern Nigeria, is swept up in electoral violence, finds refuge in a mosque, and watches as the gentle Islam he learns there is overtaken by radicalism. A novel of Nigeria's crisis of faith.

Second in Okri's Abiku trilogy, continuing Azaro's story as his family faces more brutal poverty and the spirit world intensifies its hold. The political violence of Nigeria becomes inseparable from spiritual terror.

Third in the Azaro trilogy, following the spirit child and his family to the moment of Nigerian independence. The personal and mythic are inseparable as Nigeria struggles to be born.

Ali and Kauna are neighbors in the Namibian village of Oshaantu. When Kauna's abusive husband dies, the village is divided. A quiet, powerful examination of gender, culture, and community.

Benjamin Tichafa fights in Zimbabwe's liberation war and returns to a peace that disappoints him. One of the finest fictional accounts of the chimurenga struggle and its complex aftermath.

Third volume of Farah's Blood in the Sun trilogy, set as Somalia collapses into clan warfare. Kalaman, a young man, unravels secrets about his family's past that mirror Somalia's political unraveling.

A cast of characters living in a decaying Cairo apartment building stand in for Egyptian society: a corrupt aristocrat, a Coptic Christian, a Islamist, a journalist, a gay man living in a rooftop shack.

Two love stories across a century — an English woman who falls in love with an Egyptian nationalist in 1900, and her American great-niece who discovers the story in 1997 — weaving together the colonial and the contemporary.

Continuing the story where Scheherazade left off, Mahfouz sets new tales in a timeless Cairo, where djinn, sultans, and ordinary people live together. A meditation on justice, power, and the divine.

Two parallel stories of Xhosa people separated by 150 years — the 1856 cattle-killing prophecy that destroyed the Xhosa nation, and a contemporary village debating whether to allow a casino and tourism resort.

A poor white Afrikaner family lives in Triomf, a suburb built on the rubble of Sophiatown. Set in the final days before South Africa's first democratic election, a black comedy of white decline.

Though set in Afghanistan, this novel about Amir and Hassan crosses the lines of ethnicity (Pashtun vs. Hazara) and explores guilt, redemption, and the destruction of a country. Included as a North African/Middle Eastern diaspora text.

Third volume of the Algerian Quartet, weaving together the story of a filmmaker's love affair and the 146 BCE destruction of Carthage, exploring how women's voices are lost to history and recovered.

Twelve Native American characters converge on the Big Oakland Powwow with different intentions — some to perform, some to rob it. A polyphonic novel about urban Native American identity.

In a Haitian village in 1938, a French woman is turned into a zombie on her wedding day and escapes through magic. A delirious mix of Vodou, eroticism, and Carnival set in the backdrop of American occupation.

Noted for comparison: a novel of house arrest and elegant confinement — interesting as contrast to how African writers depict confinement and surveillance without access to the elegance Towles describes.

When Baba Segi takes a fourth wife, an educated woman who upsets the household's balance, the secrets of all the wives are put at risk. A sharp, funny, feminist novel about polygamy in contemporary Nigeria.

Narrated by a man's chi (personal spirit), the novel follows Chinonso's journey from Nigeria to Cyprus on a doomed quest for love, inspired by the Igbo epic Odunke. A maximalist mythic novel.

Korede is always cleaning up after her beautiful sister Ayoola, who keeps killing her boyfriends. A darkly comic thriller about sisterhood, beauty, and complicity set in contemporary Lagos.

Ada is an ogbanje — a spirit child in Igbo cosmology — and her multiplicity of selves inhabit her body and narrate her life. A devastating examination of identity, trauma, and Nigerian spiritual belief.

Duniya, a nurse and single mother in Mogadishu, receives a mysterious gift and ponders what it means to give and receive. Set just before Somalia's collapse, it is a quiet meditation on dignity and dependency.

Fat Charlie Nancy discovers his father was Anansi, the West African spider-trickster god. His long-lost brother arrives with godlike abilities and turns his life upside down. A joyful exploration of West African mythology.

Kingsley, a top engineering graduate who can't find work, is pulled into his flamboyant uncle's 419 advance-fee fraud empire. A darkly comic examination of corruption, ambition, and the pressures on African families.

Vikram Lall, an Asian Kenyan, narrates his family's history through Kenya's independence and its descent into corruption, placed between Black, white, and Asian communities — belonging fully to none.

A gunny sack of family memories anchors Salim's journey through the history of Tanzania's Asian community — from the slave trade era through independence. Vassanji's debut novel.

An African father who sold his children into slavery 250 years ago watches their descendants scatter across the Black Atlantic — a missionary in Africa, a slave in America, a GI's wartime companion in England.

Sammar, a Sudanese woman working as a translator in Aberdeen after the death of her husband, falls in love with a Scottish academic studying Islamic politics. A quiet, luminous novel about faith and belonging.

Najwa, a Sudanese woman in London who has lost everything — her wealth, her family, her education — finds herself through working as a maid and through Islamic practice.

Two Americans try to give away $32,000 cash to strangers around the world in a week following a friend's death. Though by an American author, this novel portrays African countries with unusual honesty about Western projection.

A Ugandan family is torn apart by political violence, forced displacement, and the AIDS crisis. One of the earliest Ugandan novels by a woman to address the intersection of war and women's bodies.

A novel about a Ugandan woman who builds a community center as a center of resistance and solidarity, connecting generations of women across Uganda's turbulent history.

A Ghanaian-American family navigates the first generation's dreams against the second generation's realities — identity, assimilation, and return.

A Syrian narrator tells their dying partner stories from their shared queer life in Damascus and as refugees in Canada — love, war, displacement, and memory. Included as a North African/Middle East queer diaspora text.

A Brazilian journalist searching for a missing woman in Angola discovers connections between Angola's civil war, Brazilian slavery, and a mysterious manuscript. Agualusa's most internationally acclaimed work.

Zamani, a lodger, insinuates himself into a Zimbabwean family devastated by the disappearance of their son during Mugabe's Gukurahundi massacres. An unreliable narrator's dark, funny, disturbing novel.

Set in Croatia after the Balkan wars — though by a Sierra Leonean author, the novel's examination of memory, silence, and war's aftermath directly draws on Forna's experience of Sierra Leone's civil war.

A British psychologist arrives in post-war Sierra Leone and becomes entangled with a Sierra Leonean doctor and a dying professor whose memories span the country's descent into civil war.

Agu, a child soldier in an unnamed West African country, narrates his participation in atrocities in a fractured English that mirrors his fractured psyche. Based loosely on West Africa's civil wars.

The Sai family — Ghanaian father, Nigerian mother, four children scattered across continents — reassembles when the patriarch dies. A lyrical examination of the African immigrant family's fracture and possible healing.