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Set before, during, and after the Biafran War, the novel follows several characters whose lives are impacted by the Nigerian Civil War of the 1960s.

An epistolary novel written as a letter from Ramatoulaye to her friend Aissatou, exploring themes of polygamy, women's rights, and Islamic traditions in Senegal.

The story of Azaro, an abiku (spirit child) in an unnamed African city, blending magical realism with Yoruba mythology to explore post-colonial Nigeria.

Spanning 300 years from 18th century Ghana to contemporary America, tracing two family lines descended from half-sisters—one sold into slavery, one who marries a British slaver.

The story of beggars who revolt against a politician who expels them from the city, examining religious and social obligations in Senegalese society.

Julius, a Nigerian immigrant and psychiatry student in New York, wanders Manhattan reflecting on identity, immigration, history, and alienation.

A young man returns to Nigeria after 15 years away, documenting the corruption, chaos, and vitality of Lagos through a series of vignettes.

Ifemelu and Obinze's love story spanning Nigeria and America, exploring race, immigration, identity, and what it means to be Black in America versus Africa.

Coming-of-age story of Kambili, a 15-year-old girl in Nigeria, dealing with her authoritarian Catholic father and the country's political instability.

Post-apocalyptic fantasy set in future Sudan where Onyesonwu, a child of rape, must use her magical powers to end genocide and rewrite her world's Great Book.

A young Himba woman leaves Earth to attend an intergalactic university, becoming key to ending an ancient war between humans and the jellyfish-like Meduse.

Collection of Sankara's revolutionary speeches on anti-imperialism, women's liberation, and African unity.

Sankara's speeches on women's emancipation as essential to revolutionary transformation.

Philosophical exploration of African identity and critique of racial essentialism.

Argument for cosmopolitan ethics balancing universal moral concern with respect for difference.

Evidence that ancient Egypt was Black African civilization challenging Eurocentric historiography.

Comprehensive synthesis of Diop's arguments for African origins of civilization.

Comparative study of political and social systems in precolonial Africa.

Essays on African literature defending it against Western critical standards and colonialist perspectives.

Essays including famous critique of Conrad's Heart of Darkness as racist.

Novel about Nigerian couple's marriage tested by infertility and family pressure.

Novel weaving together two Nigerian families across class divides during economic crisis.

Mene, a naive village boy, enlists in the Nigerian Civil War to impress a girl, narrating his experience in an invented rotten English, pidgin mixed with formal registers, producing one of literature's most devastating anti-war novels.

Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator in a Lagos slum, dreams of escape while his father spirals into despair, a stunning portrait of Nigeria in the 1980s alternating between grim present and a childhood of magic and loss.

Linked stories set in Lagos during the Abacha military dictatorship, centered on Lomba, a journalist imprisoned for his writing, capturing the claustrophobia of life under tyranny, love, friendship, censorship, and the persistence of hope.

Enitan and her neighbor Sheri grow up in Lagos through the 1970s-90s, their friendship shaped by Nigeria's political upheavals, military rule, and the private violences of gender, a deeply feminist coming-of-age epic.

Esi, a successful Ghanaian professional, leaves her first husband after he rapes her and enters a polygamous marriage believing it will grant more freedom, Aidoo's unsentimental exploration of love, work, and feminist possibility in contemporary Accra.

A griot narrates the fictional dictator Koyaga's rise from village hunter to president-for-life in a thinly veiled West African republic, weaving real atrocities of the independence era into satirical mythology.

Birahima, a 12-year-old child soldier in Sierra Leone and Liberia, narrates his journey through the wars with savage humor and moral clarity, consulting four dictionaries to describe events that no dictionary can contain.

Saro-Wiwa's account of his detention by the Nigerian military government and his campaign for Ogoni rights against Shell's environmental destruction in the Niger Delta.

Written shortly after Diop visited Rwanda as part of the Rwanda Writing Project, the novel reconstructs the 1994 genocide through multiple voices — perpetrators, victims, bystanders — at a technical school that became a massacre site.

Adapted from Adichie's 2012 TEDx talk, this essay defines feminism for the 21st century from an African woman's perspective — personal, specific, and unapologetic.

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.

A systematic examination of Akan philosophical thought — its ontology, ethics, and concept of the person. Gyekye argues that the Akan philosophical tradition is a genuine philosophy, not ethnophilosophy.

In 2066, a Nigerian town has grown up around a mysterious alien biodome. Kaaro, who has psychic abilities from the alien incursion, works for a secret government agency. Part biopunk, part spy thriller, entirely Nigerian.

Second in the Wormwood Trilogy, expanding the alien biodome world as Rosewater declares independence from Nigeria. An increasingly complex examination of consciousness, identity, and alien intervention.

Sunny, an albino Nigerian-American girl living in Nigeria, discovers she is a 'free agent' with magical abilities — and must join a secret group of Leopard People to fight a serial killer.

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.

A poetry collection celebrating Yoruba rural life and ecology while mourning its destruction. Osundare's verse is rooted in Yoruba oral tradition, communal and performative.

Short stories set in refugee camps, Nigerian cities, and America, following people caught between worlds — between war and peace, between home and exile, between who they were and who they're forced to become.

Gyekye examines whether African tradition and modernity are compatible, arguing for a 'moderate communitarianism' that draws on African values of community without sacrificing individual rights.

Beah's account of being conscripted as a child soldier in Sierra Leone's civil war at age 12, his rehabilitation, and his life in New York. One of the most widely read African memoirs.

Aliens make first contact not in Washington D.C. but in Lagos. A marine biologist, a soldier, and a hip-hop star are the first to encounter them. Lagos — its chaos, its life force — is the real protagonist.

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.

Twelve short stories blending the fantastical and the real, spanning Nigeria, diaspora, and invented futures — women who knit grief out of the bereaved, scientists who calculate human emotion, mothers and daughters across generations.

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.

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.

Twelve stories about Nigerians in Nigeria and America — an immigrant woman in Connecticut, a newlywed encountering her husband's family secrets, a woman searching for her coup-arrested father.

Collected speeches of Thomas Sankara, who renamed Upper Volta as Burkina Faso and led an extraordinary revolutionary government from 1983-1987. On women's liberation, imperialism, debt, and African dignity.

A debut poetry collection by a Ghanaian-American poet exploring inherited trauma, Blackness in America, and the body as site of racial and gendered violence.

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

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.