Book picks similar to
Shameless by Futhi Ntsingila


chez-nous
coming-of-age
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south-african-literature

The Girl with the Louding Voice


Abi Daré - 2020
    Despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles in her path, Adunni never loses sight of her goal of escaping the life of poverty she was born into so that she can build the future she chooses for herself - and help other girls like her do the same. Her spirited determination to find joy and hope in even the most difficult circumstances imaginable will “break your heart and then put it back together again” (Jenna Bush Hager on The Today Show) even as Adunni shows us how one courageous young girl can inspire us all to reach for our dreams...and maybe even change the world.

Harmattan


Gavin Weston - 2011
    Spirited independent and intelligent, Haoua has benefitted from a stable home life and a loving and attentive mother. She enjoys working and playing with her siblings and friends. Haoua worships her elder brother, Abdelkrim, a serving soldier who sends money home to support the family. But, on his last home visit, Abdelkrim quarrels with their father accusing him of gambling away the money he sends and being the cause of their mother s worsening health. It also emerges that their father plans to take a second wife. Despite this Haoua finds contentment in her schoolwork, her dreams of becoming a teacher and in writing assiduously to the family in Ireland who act as her aid sponsors. But for Haoua, there are new storm clouds on the horizon. As civil strife mounts in Niger, Haoua begins to fear for Abdelkrim s safety. Haoua's mother's illness is much more serious and further advanced than anyone had recognised and her father s plans are turning out to be far more threatening than she could have ever imagined. Approaching her twelfth birthday, Haoua is alone and vulnerable for the very first time in her life.

What We Lose


Zinzi Clemmons - 2017
    She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor—someone, or something, to love. In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi’s life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood. Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman’s understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction.

African Love Poems and Proverbs with Bookmark (Petites)


C.W. Leslau - 1995
    Ranging from joyous to elegiac, verses touch on love’s delights and follies with elliptical eloquence. Lovely to read aloud or reflect on silently. Photos of African artwork accompany the text.My heart is single and cannot be dividedAnd it is fastened on a single hope;Oh, you, who might be the moon!--Somali love song

The Opposite House


Helen Oyeyemi - 2007
    Maja was five years old when her black Cuban family emigrated from the Caribbean to London. Now, almost twenty years later, Maja is a singer, in love with Aaron, pregnant, and haunted by what she calls “her Cuba.” Growing up in London, she has struggled to negotiate her history and the sense that speaking Spanish or English made her less of a black girl. But she is unable to find herself in the Ewe, Igbo, or Akum of her roots. It seems all that’s left is silence. Meanwhile distance from Cuba has only deepened Maja’s mother faith in Santeria —the fusion of Catholicism and Western African Yoruba religion—but it also divides the family as her father rails against his wife’s superstitions and the lost dreams of the Castro revolution.On the other side of the reality wall, Yemaya Saramagua, a Santeria emissary, lives in a somewherehouse with two doors: one opening to London, the other to Lagos. Yemaya is troubled by the ease with which her fellow emissaries have disguised themselves behind the personas of saints and by her inability to recognize them. Lyrical and intensely moving, The Opposite House is about the disquiet that follows us across places and languages, a feeling passed down from mother and father to son and daughter.

Complicated: The Interstellar Life and Times of Saoirse Kenneally


Colin Alexander - 2021
    Saoirse is an alcoholic and an addict who has been disowned by her family. None of the rehabs she has been in will take her back. And she just woke up in jail. Again.To avoid doing time she commits to a two-year term of off-planet service, one that will take her to Saturn’s moon Titan and then to a faraway star. The first hurdle is making it through training — Saoirse has a way of finding trouble even when she’s trying to behave. Then she is posted to Titan where every move she makes leads her deeper into a web of corruption, interstellar drug smuggling, violence, and power politics that is likely to end in disaster. Can a twenty-year old woman with a checkered past, a tenuous grip on sobriety, and an on-again off-again relationship with the truth save an entire world from a bloody power grab? And can she save herself in the bargain?

Yesterday Morning


Diana Athill - 2002
    Here she goes back to the beginning, in a sharp evocation of a childhood unfashionably filled with happiness—a Norfolk country house, servants, the pleasures of horses, the unfolding secrets of adults and sex. This is England in the 1920s, seen from the vantage point of England in 2001. It was a privileged and loving life: but did it make her happy?

The Cry of the Go-Away Bird


Andrea Eames - 2011
    As a young white girl in 1990s Zimbabwe, her life is idyllic. Her clothes are always clean and ironed, there is always tea in the silver teapot, gin and tonics are served on the veranda, and, in theory at least, black and white live in harmony.However this dream-world of her childhood cannot last. As Elise gets older, her eyes are opened to the complexities of adult existence, both through the changes wrought in her family by the arrival of her step-father Steve, and through her growing understanding of the tensions in Zimbabwean society. As Mugabe's presidency turns sour, the privileged world of the white farmers begins to crumble into anarchy.The Cry of the Go-Away Bird follows Elise as she attempts to make sense of her place in the world while her family struggle to stay afloat in the collapsing economy and escalating horror that surrounds them. As the violence intensifies and the farm invasions begin, Elise and her family are forced to confront difficult choices and the ancient unforgiving ghosts of the past.

We Need New Names


NoViolet Bulawayo - 2013
    In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad.But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her--from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to J.M. Coetzee--while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.

The Lion


D. Camille - 2016
    A retired professional baseball player, he returns to his home in Detroit to purchase a major league franchise. Rion has to tackle government corruption and systematic racism in his quest. He didn’t realize that one person held the key to all of his dreams until she knocks him off his feet. Rion becomes completely mesmerized by hazel eyes along with a no nonsense attitude and tough city girl exterior. Tauri Patterson is the city Prosecutor and her job is to fight for the citizens of Detroit. Her strength and intelligence have made her one of the top litigators. Little did she know that when she received Rion Shaw’s case on her desk, her life would never be the same. The six-foot four decadent chocolate dream walks into her office and changes her life. She’s swept off her feet by the confident warrior who knows who he is and what he wants. Together they must overcome the threats against them in order to achieve the task before them. Rion and Tauri find that love and family can overcome every barrier.