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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.

Baako returns from studying in America full of idealism, but his family and a society consumed by materialism destroy him. Armah's second novel, even darker than his debut.

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.

Morrison's landmark essays examining how Black presence shaped the white American literary imagination — how canonical American authors like Poe, Cather, and Hemingway wrote about and around Blackness.

Morrison's final Harvard Norton Lectures, examining how literature constructs the 'Other' — how we narrativize race, how foreignness is produced, and how literature can counter othering.

Couto's debut story collection — 21 stories of the Mozambican interior, blending myth, war memory, and everyday magical transformation. Launched one of the most distinctive voices in African literature.

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.

Short stories from Zimbabwe, unflinching in their examination of grief, violence, and survival in a country that has endured relentless crisis. Tshuma's debut collection.

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.

A Middle Kingdom narrative of exile, return, kingship, and belonging. Sinuhe flees Egypt after the death of Amenemhat I, builds a life abroad, and is eventually summoned home by the pharaoh.

A Middle Kingdom tale in which a wronged peasant delivers a sequence of speeches demanding justice from corrupt officials and appealing to maat, the moral order.

A collection of instructions attributed to the vizier Ptahhotep, advising ethical conduct, humility, listening, speech, justice, and leadership.

A corpus of funerary spells, hymns, and declarations guiding the dead through judgment and rebirth, often known in English as the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

The Ethiopian national epic linking the Queen of Sheba, King Solomon, Menelik I, and the Ark of the Covenant into a sacred history of Ethiopian kingship.

Griotic accounts of Askia Mohammed Ture, ruler of the Songhay Empire, remembered for imperial consolidation, Islamic learning, trade, pilgrimage, and statecraft.

A seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicle recounting the history of Mali, Songhay, Islamic scholarship, political succession, and urban life in the Niger bend.

A Sahelian chronicle associated with Timbuktu's scholarly families, preserving histories of Mali, Songhay, clerical lineages, and political authority.

A Swahili epic poem composed in Arabic script, narrating Islamic battles and embedding coastal East African poetics, memory, and literary form.

Chronicle traditions concerning the rulers, trade networks, Islamization, and maritime power of Kilwa on the Swahili coast.

Royal and popular oral traditions preserving histories of the Kingdom of Dahomey, its institutions, military organization, sacred kingship, and political memory.

A Kenyan speculative short film set after ecological catastrophe, following a curator who discovers a seed and imagines life beyond a sealed authoritarian society.

A collection of speculative stories blending Ugandan settings, folklore, technology, horror, and political imagination.

A surreal speculative novella from Botswana exploring erasure, identity, bodily transformation, and social control.

A Lagos-set godpunk novel in which a demigod mercenary navigates deities, urban survival, and spiritual power after gods fall to earth.

A desert fantasy novella about water, sacrifice, empire, myth, and the stories power tells to preserve itself.

A Jalada Africa anthology of speculative futures from African writers, artists, and editors working across the continent and diaspora.

A novel drawing on Igbo ontology and embodiment to narrate selfhood, spirit, fracture, and survival through the life of Ada.

A science-fiction novel set around a Nigerian space program after a solar catastrophe, mixing technological ambition, politics, and crisis.