BOTSWANA
Alexander
McCall Smith The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
On the edge of the Kalahari, Miss Ramotswe, the Miss
Marple of Botswana, solves crimes with an innate, self-possessed wisdom combined
with a keen understanding of human nature.
KENYA
Isak
Dinesen Out of Africa and
Shadows on the Grass
Out of Africa is Karen Blixen’s love letter to the
country she called home for nearly 20 years. Writing under her pen name, she
brings to life the wonders of Kenya.
Linda Donelson
Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa: Karen Blixen’s Untold Story
A candid biography of Karen Blixen and her complex
relationships with her husband, Baron Bror Blixen, and her lover.
M.G. Vassanji
The Book of Secrets: A Novel
Set in the melting pot of East Africa, where African,
Arab, Indian, English and German cultures mesh, The Book of Secrets
contrasts the life of an Indian –born retired history teacher, Pius Fernandes,
with that of the lives of the characters revealed in a diary written by Alfred
Corbin, the English consul stationed in British Africa in 1913.
NIGERIA
Chinua
Achebe Things Fall Apart
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” a line from
Yeats’ The Second Coming, sets the theme for this relentlessly
unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after colonialism.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Purple Hibiscus
First person narrator, Kambili Achike, a 15-year- old
Nigerian girl growing up in sheltered privilege in a country ravaged by
political strife, reveals the complexities facing her as she portrays a side to
her family no one else sees.
REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
Barbara Kingsolver The
Poisonwood Bible
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four
daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist minister who takes his
family on aa mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.
J.M. Coetzee
Disgrace
David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or
anyone else’s. He is at the end of his professional and romantic game. A
professor at Cape Town University College, he seduces one of his students and he
gets himself fired, an act of contempt. Much more follows which needs to be
explored in this painful novel of disgrace and consolation.
Damon Galgut
The Good Doctor
Resigned to self-exile at an inadequate hospital in his
desolate former “homeland,” the disillusioned Dr. Frank Eloff befriends a new
volunteer who hopes to revive this rural hospital and, more importantly, South
Africa in general.
Nadine Gordimer
Burger’s Daughter
Rosa Burger grew up in a home under constant surveillance
by the South African government. Both her parents died for their political
beliefs. Yet, even after their deaths, the history of anti-apartheid beliefs
and practices has a daily impact on her life as everyone is watching her.
Sindiwe Magona
Mother to Mother
The senseless killing of Amy Biehl, a young Fulbright
scholar who had gone to South Africa to help residents prepare for the first
democratic elections in the history of that country, is the basis for this
novel.
Alan
Paton Cry, the Beloved Country
A beautifully told
and profoundly moving and compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo
and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa under
apartheid.
EGYPT
Agatha Christie
Death on the Nile
Hercule Poirot, perhaps Agatha Christie’s most
interesting and endearing character, solves a murder while vacationing on the
Nile in Africa.
Paulo Coelho
The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dreams
This inspirational fable tells of a young Spanish
shepherd seeking his destiny as he travels to Egypt where he learns lessons
about life, particularly from a wise, old alchemist.
Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet: Justine/ Balthazar/ Mountolive/ Clea This classic series of four novels describe, from different viewpoints, a series of events in Alexandria before World War II.
Annette Kobak
The Map of Love
A wonderfully accomplished work of fiction telling the
intersecting stories of three women---Egyptian, American, and English--- one of
whom lives a century earlier than the other two.
Naguib Mahfouz
Palace Walk (Cairo Trilogy)
Examining the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad, a middle-class
merchant whose family life strictly follows the guidelines outlined in the
Qur’an, Palace Walk, the first in the trilogy, provides a close look into
Cairo society at the end of World War I.
IRAN
Azar Nafisi
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
After resigning from her job as a professor at a
university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of
her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in
her home.
ISRAEL
Batya Gur
Saturday Morning Murder
Mochael Ohayon of the Jerusalem police solves the murder
of a prominent middle-aged woman psychoanalyst in this sophisticated thriller
that reveals a look at Israeli society and culture.
Amos Oz
A Tale of Love and Darkness
This memoir of family history set during the Jerusalem of
the 1940’s and 50’s chronicles Oz’s life from childhood in British-ruled
Jerusalem to literary fame in Kibbutz Hulda, where Oz (born Amos Braz) lived and
where he adopted his nom de plume.