Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Made me cry. It is such a moving book, told with such heart and grace. Eghosa Imasuen’s Fine Boys made me laugh. It’s a brilliant novel about contemporary Nigeria.”

“It is filled with longing, melancholy and nostalgia, and it is so atmospheric, so hauntingly described, that the reader never quite emerges from the book”

“I loved this book as a teenager and have never forgotten how completely absorbed I was by Turgenev’s wonderfully evocative world.”

“It made me see that it was, in fact, possible for people of colour to exist within literature. Arrow of God has remained one of my favourite novels. Set in 1920s Igboland, it tells the story of a remarkable priest, Ezeulu, and a British administrator, and the ways in which colonialism brought not only political but cultural changes. It is funny and absorbing, moving and beautiful. I love this book.”

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“A young Nigerian American comes out as gay, is a coming of age story about the difficult, churning mix of family expectations. It is elegant and elegiac, and evokes Washington DC with subtle power.”

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“This is a humourous, irreverent and unabashedly political novel; it is an enraged lament about postcolonial Africa and how the leaders who inherited supposedly independent countries went on to fail their citizens. Some leaders are closely modelled on real characters – Mobutu of Zaire and Lumumba of the Congo are impossible to miss. The simplified summary of Kourouma: Colonialism has spawned monsters in the name of African leaders, and the West is the creator of these Frankensteins. The narrative is complex. There is a wonderfully oral quality to the telling, and many stories and anecdotes are laughaloud funny. Kourouma insists – and this underlies the narrative – that African dictators are mostly guided by their belief in the traditional, the supernatural, and that Islam or Christianity are mere windowdressing. This is a good example of an intelligent and important book that’s also genuinely interesting.”