Picture Books show
Taiye Selasi recommends
In Such Tremendous Heat (2023)
Kehinde Fadipe
"Unlike anything I've ever read. Slick, agile, and utterly engrossing, this spectacular debut features a set of protagonists so rarely portrayed: Black women expats."
Freshwater (2018)
Akwaeke Emezi
"Freshwater is one of those dazzling novels that defies these kinds of descriptions. We can gesture to the story - set in Nigeria and America, told by all the selves of its Tamil/Igbo protagonist - but such synthesis fails to convey the magic that awaits its reader. At once fiction and memoir, potent in its spiritual richness and sexual frankness, the text seems not to have been written by but channeled through its brilliant author. This may be Emezi’s debut novel but she is an old - an ancient - storyteller: thrillingly at home in the tradition of griots, poets, seers and seekers."
Born on a Tuesday (2016)
Elnathan John
"With brave, unflinching candor expressed through spare, unadorned prose, Elnathan John considers the rise of Islamic extremism in Nigeria as experienced by one young man. Anyone seeking to peer beyond the media's portrayals of Boko Haram must read this book, not because it offers a hopeful account but because it offers a human one."
Books containing stories by Taiye Selasi
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