Showing results by narrator "Nene Nwoko" in All Categories

In the Nigerian city of Enugu, young Nwabulu, a housemaid since the age of ten, dreams of becoming a typist as she endures her employers' endless chores. She is tall and beautiful and in love with a rich man's son. Educated and privileged, Julie is a modern woman. Living on her own, she is happy to collect the gold jewelry lovestruck Eugene brings her, but has no intention of becoming his second wife. When a kidnapping forces Nwabulu and Julie into a dank room years later, the two women relate the stories of their lives as they await their fate.

Bata, a young girl tormented by nightmares, wakes up one night to find herself standing sentinel before her cousin's door. Her cousin is to get married the next morning, but only if she can escape the murderous attack of a ghost-bride, who used to be engaged to her groom. A supernatural possession helps Bata battle and vanquish the vengeful ghost bride, and following a botched exorcism, she is transported to Ibaja-La, the realm of dead brides. There, she receives secret powers to fight malevolent ghost-brides before being sent back to the human realm.

Off the coast of West Africa, decades after the dangerous rise of the Atlantic Ocean, the region’s survivors live inside five partially submerged, kilometers-high towers originally created as a playground for the wealthy. Now the towers’ most affluent rule from their lofty perch at the top while the rest are crammed into the dark, fetid floors below sea level.

A searing, unflinching collection of stories set in Nigeria that explores themes of community expectations, familial strife, and the struggle for survival.

Being the opara of the family, Kingsley Ibe is entitled to certain privileges—a piece of meat in his egusi soup, a party to celebrate his graduation from university. But times are bad in Nigeria. Now he worries that without a "long-leg"—someone who knows someone who can help him—his degrees will do nothing. When a tragedy befalls his family, Kingsley learns the hardest lesson of all: education may be the language of success in Nigeria, but it's money that does the talking. When Kingsley turns to his Uncle Boniface for help, he learns that charity may come with strings attached.

From the moment Sunny Nwazue discovered she had mystical energy flowing in her blood, she sought to understand and control her powers. Throughout her adventures, she had to navigate the balance between nearly everything in her life—America and Nigeria, the "normal" world and the one infused with juju, human and spirit, good daughter and powerful Leopard Person. Now, those hard lessons and abilities are put to the test in a quest so dangerous and fantastical, it would be madness to go . . . but may destroy the world if she does not.

Yarima Lalo believes he has been murdered twice before. The cause? Love. To make sense of these vivid memories he cannot shake, he travels from Abuja to Kano with his new friend and love interest Aziza to meet an old woman who he might have known in a past life. She is skeptical at first - and hesitant to revisit painful memories of her own - but together, they dig deeper and deeper into the past, piecing together a shared history with ripple effects that could shape Lalo’s future.

A ghost decides to help the shy young woman living in her former house. Kyra dreams of becoming an artist, and she flourishes under the guidance of her ghostly mentor. This short, supernatural tale will appeal to fans of friendly ghost stories and family reconciliation.

Bessem notices Fatima for the first time on the soccer field-muscular and focused, she's the only woman playing and seems completely at ease. When Fatima chases a rogue ball in her direction, Bessem freezes, mesmerized by the athlete's charm and beauty. One playful wink from Fatima, and Bessem knows her life will never be the same.

God of Mercy is set in Ichulu, an Igbo village where the people's worship of their gods is absolute. Their adherence to tradition has allowed them to evade the influences of colonialism and globalization. But the village is reckoning with changes, including a war between gods signaled by Ijeoma, a girl who can fly.

In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama, aboard a ship called Clotilda. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they'd been delivered.

Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse's debut novel follows three generations torn apart by the genocide against the Tutsis, as they try to reconnect with one another, rebuild broken relationships, and find their place in today's world. Blanche returns to Rwanda after building a life in Bordeaux with her husband and young son, Stokely. Reuniting with her mother Immaculata, old wounds are reopened for both mother and daughter while Stokely, caught between two countries, tries to understand where he comes from and where he belongs.

Eat. Dance. Fight. This is the life of the girls who compete in the Isle’s elite, all-female fighting sport of Bowing. But it isn’t really Dirt’s life anymore. At sixteen, she is old and has retired from competition. Instead, she spends her days coaching the younger sisters of the Mud Fam and dreading her fast-approaching birthday, when she’ll have to leave her sisters to fulfill whatever destiny the Gods choose for her.

Barrow Boy is an enchanting tale of a young lad's quest to find the secrets of becoming a great man. Despite the odds, young Ladi's mother, Nana is determined to help her son succeed and learn the secrets of becoming a great man like his father was. Unable to take on the task of instructing her son, she leads him to the door steps of an old wise tutor who ushers him into a whole new world. The story emphasizes four basic success nuggets: Desire, determination, discipline, and dance, explained in a comical manner that gently penetrates the mind of a young listener.

The sun has set and the moon is rising, and that means it’s bedtime. But not if Lala has a say—because she’s not ready to go to sleep! First she needs to say good night to the cat. And the goat. And the chickens. And, and, and . . . Lala’s adorable stalling strategy will ring true for all parents whose little ones aren’t ready to say goodbye to the day—and all will appreciate the wonderful culmination to the bedtime ritual.

A murderer returns to Africa, seeking atonement for killing an innocent. Now that Carlos has emptied out his life, his past torments him. He can't go forward until he goes back - to Ghana - to own up to crimes he committed as a young man. A woman escapes poverty in Africa, but is trapped in a life supporting those she left behind. Liz left Ghana and is now a successful career woman in the USA. Freed from the daily oppression of scarcity, she remains under the vice-grip power of her hoarding mother and needy siblings. Their lives cross...

Gods and Heroes is the first volume of the Itan - Legends of the Golden Age trilogy about the thousand-year story of the Yoruba people. It starts with the establishment of Ile-Ife by Oduduwa and the great sacrifice of the heroine Moremi. The ancient gods of Yorubaland, Obatala, Orunmila, Ogun, and Olokun all play their part, as well as the great heroes and heroines of antiquity. The author uses the genre of the historical novel in a refreshing and imaginative fashion to present the whole tableau of Yoruba history.

In 1789, Mo’destee Vert was a Senegambia teenager in love and happier than ever as she prepard to become an adult. Everything changed when white strangers speaking a foreign language attacked her village. After a grueling voyage across the ocean, she found herself labeled Modesty Greene, slave. She became the property of Robert Banks, a plantation owner in Dorchester County, Maryland. At night, she dreamed of her home in Africa. She longed to see her brother and parents, but mostly, she missed the man that never became her husband.

Colm Reid, a disillusioned journalist in Dublin, is invited by Norwegian conservationist Kennet Haven to cover a story in the remote Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Colm joins Kennet, Kennet’s sister Jane, Belgian journalist Fatou Ba, and the rangers of Garamba on an expedition into the park to look for the last surviving wild northern white rhinos on the planet. Kennet neglected to mention one thing: the park is in the middle of a war zone.

Mara Kardas-Nelson's We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky is a story about unintended consequences, blind optimism, and the decades-long ramifications of seemingly small policy choices. The book is rooted in the stories of women borrowers in Sierra Leone, West Africa, whose narratives are set against the rise of Yunus's vision that tiny loans would "put poverty in museums," as well as a deep history of modern international development.