Book picks similar to
Hill of Fools by R.L. Peteni
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Dumot
Alan Navarra - 2011
Like the last kiss from a scorned one-nighter. Like the walls of inch-thick dirt that have been there for 14 years. Redundant conversations in a basement that echo for months on end. A staircase with old, stinky wood. Prime time kabobohan. 4-day old socks. Reflective surfaces in moments of discomfort. Blood all the wrong places. A painful gut. And just like the pain of process-oriented frustration, I hate it.
Architects Of Poverty
Moeletsi Mbeki - 2009
Along with his candid expose of the problems, he poses some suggestions about what needs to be done to break the stranglehold of the African elites on political power and to set sub-Saharan Africa once more on the road to development.
The Mourning Bird
Mubanga Kalimamukwento - 2019
Faced with the difficult choice of living with their abusive extended family or slithering into the dark underbelly of Lusaka’s streets, Chimuka and Ali escape and become street kids.Against the backdrop of a failed military coup, election riots and a declining economy, Chimuka and Ali are raised by drugs, crime and police brutality. As a teenager, Chimuka is caught between prostitution and the remnants of the fragile stability that existed before her parents’ death.The Mourning Bird is not just Chimuka’s story, it’s a national portrait of Zambia in an era of strife. With lively and unflinching prose, Kalimamukwento paints a country’s burden, shame and silence, which, when juxtaposed with Chimuka’s triumph, forms an empowering debut novel.
His Fire Inside
Fiona Murphy - 2018
The arrogant billionaire manwhore is to blame for turning my beloved Austin from quirky, cool college town to hipster paradise. It's a good thing I don't have to deal with him while I help his mother recover from a stroke. Her, I love. Him, all right I might have this insane desire to lick the dimple in his chin. Then there's the way from the outside he's calm, cool, collected and in control as if nothing fazes him. It makes me want to press his buttons, to make him lose control, to see the fire he hides inside. The fire I felt all too briefly. The fire I can't forget even as I tell myself I'm crazy because no way could a man as gorgeous as Rourke want a plus size like me. If my plus size doesn't put him off my family situation will. Both of our lives are too complicated to add romance to it. Besides, he's made it clear for the six months I'm his employee I'm off limits. Except he's still staring at me with the heat of a volcano ready to explode. Like a fool, I'm drawn to the fire even when I know it means one of us will get burned, but who? **Trigger warning** The h's sister is experiencing domestic violence. **This is a standalone however Sam King from A Favor appears briefly. You need not have read A Favor to read His Fire Inside.**
Learning To Swim
Trevor Hambric - 2011
She is not looking to fall in love, either. Her only ambition, when she and her daughter, Lily, take their first summer trip to New Hampshire’s Squam Lake, is a restful, scenic vacation. But she will soon learn that the world has another offering. Within minutes of their arrival that first summer, they meet a man named Aidan Heron. His is a gift that will teach them both, with an easy humor and a nearly fearless penchant for adventure, that life has more to offer than they'd ever understood. Shaped by tragedy in her youth, Hannah has learned to live a timid, closed life. And without realizing it, she has taught her daughter to do the same. But Aidan, a man who has experienced his own tragedy and responded very differently, will show them both a new way. Through ten years of shared summer vacations, Hannah will experience enthrallment, love and heartache. She will be challenged and will learn to challenge herself. And in the course of meeting these challenges, she will learn how to truly live.
THIS is Africa
Mat Dry - 2012
THIS is Africa is a compilation of stories that defines the maxim "Truth is sometimes stranger, and more wondrous than fiction." From a place known for its continent-wide diversity, notorious for its dramatic turbulence, and beloved for its animals and untamed wildness, Mat Dry, brings his incredible true tales of living and working in Africa as a Safari Guide.
Fools and Other Stories
Njabulo S. Ndebele - 1986
He has gone on to become one of the most powerful voices for cultural freedom on the whole of the African continent today. Ndebele evokes township life with humor and subtlety, rejecting the image of black South Africans as victims and focusing on the complexity and fierce energy of their lives. "Our literature," says Ndebele, "ought to seek to move away from an easy preoccupation with demonstrating the obvious existence of oppression. It exists. The task is to explore how and why people can survive under such harsh conditions." About Njabulo Ndebele: now Chancellor of Witwatersrand University in South Africa. Ndebele began publishing these stories from exile in Lesotho during the 1980s. Ndebele is now recognised as a major voice in South Africa's cultural life. This is his only fiction collection available in Europe or North America. Ndebele's stories first began appearing in Staffrider magazine, an innovative publishing venture linked to the Soweto branch of South African PEN. Founded after the bloody Soweto riots of the mid-1970s, the magazine took as its symbol the staffriders, un-ticketed commuters from the black townships who every day clung onto or balanced on top of buses and trains to get into the cities to work. Staffrider magazine, and in particular Ndebele's stories, helped define a new tone in black South African literature that went beyond and finally overcame apartheid.
Coconut
Kopano Matlwa - 2007
Redefining what it means to be young, black and beautiful in the the New South Africa. Winner of the European Union Literary Award.
In Dependence
Sarah Ladipo Manyika - 2008
In this city of dreaming spires, he finds himself among a generation high on visions of a new and better world. The whole world seems ablaze with change: independence at home, the Civil Rights movement and the first tremors of cultural and sexual revolutions. It is then that Tayo meets Vanessa Richardson, the beautiful daughter of an ex-colonial officer. In Dependence is Tayo and Vanessa's story of a brave but bittersweet love affair. It is the story of two people struggling to find themselves and each other - a story of passion and idealism, courage and betrayal, and the universal desire to fall, madly, deeply, in love.
Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond
Ekow Eshun - 2005
In 2001, at the age of thirty-three, Ekow Eshun-born in London to African-born parents-embarks on a trip to Ghana in search of his roots, and in this rich narrative he evokes both the physical and emotional aspects of his travels. Eshun makes his way to Accra, Ghana's cosmopolitan capital city; to the storied slave forts of Elmina; to the historic warrior kingdom of Asante. He reflects on earlier pilgrims who followed the same path-W. E. B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X-and on the millions of slaves shipped to the West from the Ghanaian coast. He recalls the racially charged years of his youth, and he considers the paradoxes and possibilities in contemporary Britain for someone like himself. Finally, he uncovers a long-held secret about his lineage that will compel him to question everything he knows about himself and about where he comes from. Written with exquisite particularity of place and mind, and with rare immediacy and candor, "Black Gold of the Sun" tells a story of identity, belonging, and unexpected hope.
From Pasta to Pigfoot
Frances Mensah Williams - 2015
Her less than successful attempts to be seen as more than a cultural lightweight take Faye on a journey back to her native Ghana, where she finds love, culture galore and the confidence to fulfil her potential. From Pasta to Pigfoot explores in a light-hearted way the clash of cultures in this modern, multicultural world.
Arrows of Rain
Okey Ndibe - 2000
It seeks to expose the fallacies of the human condition while remaining real in its depiction of universal problems inflicted on postcolonial Africa.
The Madams
Zukiswa Wanner - 2007
She loves her cute son Hintsa, her witty husband Mandla, her comfortably challenging work with the tourism board, and her best friends Nosizwe and Lauren. But she has to admit – its tough being Superwoman in South Africa today. Try being the perfect traditional wife and African mother at home, the perfect promotable black woman at work, and the perfect foil for her Benetton friends one black and Xhosa, one white and English! Thandi admits defeat and decides she needs that great South African bourgeois accessory: a maid. And since she doesnt have the heart to boss about a sister in her own home, she decides it must be a white maid. Marita joining the household seems to disrupt the comfortable space Thandi, Siz and Lauren have settled into. The secrets of the three womens lives are dramatically exposed and they are forced to confront their assumptions about relationships, history and each other.