by Naomi Benaron

Sheltered within the rural confines of his impoverished Tutsi village, Jean Patrick dreams of one day running in the Olympics. But as he grows stronger and faster, so does the conflict between his tribe and the Hutus. 

 

by S. A. Chakraborty

To survive on the streets of 18th-century Cairo, Egypt, Nahri, a young con artist, lives by luck and skill. While she carries out her trades of palm and tea leaf readings, along with healings, she knows them to be just tricks, not magic - until the night she summons a djinn warrior during one of her cons.

 

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, Tambudzai moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.

 

by Dave Eggers

novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children --the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. 

 

by Gal Faye

French hip-hip artist Faye's semiautobiographical tale of 10-year-old Gabriel and his family living through the turmoil in Burundi and Rwanda in the early 1990s explores the classic themes of home and identity overlaid with the horrors of genocide and fleeing refugees.

 

by Alain Mabanckou

Follows the existential misfortunes of an orphan whose name means "Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors." Things were always bad for Moses at the orphanage in Loango, but after the orphanage's director and his cronies, all relatives, change allegiance as the socialist revolution takes over the Congo, Moses decides to escape to the city of Pointe-Noire with the twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala. 

 

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

A man named Kamu Kintu is branded a thief and killed by a vicious crowd. While his body lies unclaimed in the mortuary, we follow his lineage back to 1750, when Kintu Kidda journeys with his tribe to pay tribute to the regent of the new kingdom. He hopes to gain favor; instead, he inadvertently causes the death of his own son and awakens a curse that will plague his offspring for generations. 

 

by Hisham Matar

Suleiman is a nine-year-old in Qaddafi's Libya, proud of his country and his father, and worried about his mother's "illness." He is unprepared to understand the danger his father, a believer in democracy, is in, or the role that he, just a child, must play to protect his family.

by Imbolo Mbue

They could not have picked a worse company to hitch their wagon to nor a worse time to do so. It is late 2007, and the economy is on the cusp of the Great Recession when young Cameroonian immigrants Jende and Neni Jonga chase after the American dream in New York City. Despite lacking papers, Jende finds a job as chauffeur to one of Lehman's top executives, Clark Edwards. 

 

by Dinaw Mengestu

In his run-down store in a gentrifying neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Ethiopian immigrant Stepha Stephanos regularly meets with fellow African immigrants Ken the Kenyan and Joe from the Congo. Their favorite game is matching African nations to coups and dictators, as they consider how their new immigrant expectations measure up to the reality of life in America after 17 years. 

 

by Nadifa Mohamed

It is 1987 and Hargeisa waits. Whispers of revolution travel on the dry winds, but still the dictatorship remains secure.
Soon, through the eyes of three women, we will see Somalia fall.

 

by Wayétu Moore

Reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia's early years through three unforgettable characters: Gbessa, was starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia and who hides his unusual strength. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. 

 

by Marie NDiaye

Three Senegalese women rely on their unshakable sense of self when faced with great disappointment.  Three loosely interwoven sections tell stories of women whose struggle for self-preservation has irrevocably wounded them.

 

by Yewande Omotoso

Hortensia James and Marion Agostino have been neighbors and enemies for more than 20 years, practically since the day Hortensia and her husband moved in next door to Marion.  When circumstances force the two women to turn to each other of necessity, their resulting awakening is deeply satisfying and realistic in its untidiness.

 

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Odidi Oganda, running for his life, is gunned down in the streets of Nairobi. His grief-stricken sister, Ajany, just returned from Brazil, and their father bring his body back to their crumbling home in the Kenyan drylands, seeking some comfort and peace. But the murder has stirred memories long left untouched and unleashed a series of unexpected events.

 

by Kwei Quartey

A police procedural set in modern Ghana, introducing detective Darko Dawson.  Sent to investigate a murder in remote Ketanu, where traditional beliefs about the spirit world still reign, Dawson finds no lack of suspects, as the beautiful victim was a married man's impatient mistress and a controversial crusader against AIDS and trokosi, the ancient custom in which young girls become slave wives to local priests.

 

by Namwali Serpell

In 1904, across the Zambezi River from the Old Drift colonial settlement, one Percy M. Clark, plagued with fever, pulls the hat -  and a large amount of hair - off of Italian hotelier Pietro Gavuzzi. Pietro's daughter Lina then hits young native N'gulube. Thus starts a generational story of three families that cannot escape one another.

 

by Michael Stanley
 

Smashed skull, snapped ribs, and a cloying smell of carrion. Leave the body for the hyenas to devour--no body, no case.

 

But when Kalahari game rangers stumble on a human corpse midmeal, it turns out the murder wasn't perfect after all. Enough evidence is left to suggest foul play. 

 

by Christie Watson

When their mother catches their father with another woman, twelve year-old Blessing and her fourteen-year-old brother, Ezikiel, are forced to leave their comfortable home in Lagos for a village in the Niger Delta, to live with their mother's family, in a home without running water or electricity.