Azubuike Obi

Okonkwo struggles to find her feet in the first fifty pages of her debut, but when she eventually does, she keeps us entertained, thrilled, enraged and ponderous in equal measure.

Fascinating in the clarity of its observations. A novel of culture and sociology. A novel of the world. I will be back again next year to witness Ifemelu’s malaise and Obinze’s longings.

Currently reading. One of my lifelong fascinations is to understand fraudsters—their intimate lives, their minds, their drive. I always say that had my family not left Onicha at the time we did, I, too, may have been swallowed by the world of yahoo-yahoo, like many…

This has an important story at heart but it is a story whose plot is so engineered, its themes so overtly stated, its characters so loquacious, the imposition is unmistakable. And it doesn’t help that a novel with five distinct narrators is written entirely in the first person.

This novel is directionless for the most part, yet something about it is strangely compelling. I found A Particular Kind of Black Man to be an intriguing, even if not fully realized, inquiry on migration, manhood, memory, and how we hold on to the lives we may never get to live.

This one! So heart-rending, so exquisitely written.

A shallow retelling of the violence the world does to women. It’s one of those stories where you know the author is deeply empathetic to the horrors they’ve seen in the NGO space, yet they lack the gravitas to put it down in the demanding form of the novel.

A new year. A new age. A new reason to be grateful. 🙌🏾

An intricately written novel about faith, family, addiction, loss, migration, and all of the messy things about loving and being human. The sharpness of Yaa Gyasi’ writing DAZZLED me.