My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite – NIGERIAShort novel set in MANHATTAN
Ten Great Books Set Across WEST AFRICA
25th May 2026
Ten great books set across West Africa.
West Africa is a region of immense cultural depth and dynamic growth, spanning 16 countries from the Sahara’s edge to the Atlantic coast. It is defined by its rich history – home to ancient empires like Ghana and Mali – and its incredible linguistic and musical diversity, which heavily influenced global genres like jazz, reggae, and afrobeats. Economically and culturally powerhouse nations like Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal drive the region forward. Though facing challenges related to climate change and political transitions, West Africa’s youthful population, creative industries, and deep-rooted traditions make it one of the most vibrant, rapidly evolving landscapes on the continent.
Here are ten of our favourite books set across the region.
Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor – LAGOS
After word gets out on the Internet that aliens have landed in the waters outside of the world’s fifth most populous city, chaos ensues. Soon the military, religious leaders, thieves, and crackpots are trying to control the message on YouTube and on the streets. Meanwhile, the earth’s political superpowers are considering a preemptive nuclear launch to eradicate the intruders. All that stands between 17 million anarchic residents and death is an alien ambassador, a biologist, a rapper, a soldier, and a myth that may be the size of a giant spider, or a god revealed.
Tiny Sunbirds Far Away by Christie Watson – LAGOS, WARRI
Blessing (12) and her brother Ezekiel (14) find their comfortable lives in Lagos change immensely when their parents separate. They move to near Warri, their Mother’s village. This is the story of the small family adapting to a different way of live, rural life in exchange for the big city.
‘Everything changed after Mama found Father lying on top of another woman.’
Blessing and her brother Ezikiel adore their larger-than-life father, their glamorous mother and their comfortable life in Lagos. But all that changes when their father leaves them for another woman.
Their mother is fired from her job at the Royal Imperial Hotel – only married women can work there – and soon they have to quit their air-conditioned apartment to go and live with their grandparents in a compound in the Niger Delta. Adapting to life with a poor countryside family is a shock beyond measure after their privileged upbringing in Lagos.
Told in Blessing’s own beguiling voice, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away shows how some families can survive almost anything. At times hilarious, always poignant, occasionally tragic, it is peopled with characters you will never forget.
Accra Noir by Nana-Ama Danquah (Editor) – ACCRA
Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.
Brand-new stories by: Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, Kwame Dawes, Adjoa Twum, Kofi Blankson Ocansey, Billie McTernan, Ernest Kwame Nkrumah Addo, Patrick Smith, Anne Sackey, Gbontwi Anyetei, Nana-Ama Danquah, Ayesha Harruna Attah, Eibhlín Ní Chléirigh, and Anna Bossman.
From the introduction by Nana-Ama Danquah:
Accra is the perfect setting for noir fiction. The telling of such tales–ones involving or suggesting death, with a protagonist who is flawed or devious, driven by either a self-serving motive or one of the seven deadly sins–is woven into the fabric of the city’s everyday life…
Accra is more than just a capital city. It is a microcosm of Ghana. It is a virtual map of the nation’s soul, a complex geographical display of its indigenous presence, the colonial imposition, declarations of freedom, followed by coups d’état, decades of dictatorship, and then, finally, a steady march forward into a promising future…
Much like Accra, these stories are not always what they seem. The contributors who penned them know too well how to spin a story into a web…It is an honor and a pleasure to share them and all they reveal about Accra, a city of allegories, one of the most dynamic and diverse places in the world.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – NIGERIA
The story of Biafra’s struggle to establish an independent nation.
Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007, this is a heartbreaking, exquisitely written literary masterpiece. Now a major film starring Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor, due for release in 2014
In 1960s Nigeria, Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, goes to work for Odenigbo, a radical university professor. Soon they are joined by Olanna, a young woman who has abandoned a life of privilege to live with her charismatic lover. Into their world comes Richard, an English writer, who has fallen for Olanna’s sharp-tongued sister Kainene. But when the shocking horror of civil war engulfs the nation, their loves and loyalties are severely tested, while their lives pull apart and collide once again in ways none of them could have imagined…
The Palm Oil Stain by Nadia Maddy – SIERRA LEONE
The Palm Oil Stain is a brutal tale of a woman’s journey of love and survival. Set against the backdrop of the Rebel War in Sierra Leone, Shalimar escapes an attack on her village assisted by a South African mercenary the locals call Chameleon. Displaced in Freetown, Shalimar devises a plan to return home to locate her family while forging an unlikely relationship with Chameleon whose alcoholic abuse has left him bereft of any emotion. Shalimar soon learns her predicament was brought about by the betrayal of those close to her. Shalimar’s decision to risk the wrath of the Rebels in the abandoned villages in order to find her family changes the course of her and Chameleon’s life forever. The Palm Oil Stain is a deeply moving love story that relays the harsh reality of war, betrayal and redemption.
Toubab Tales by Rob Baker – MALI
“Go to Mali,” they said. “The music is amazing,” they said. “And you get ten hours of sunshine every day.” So I did, and this is the story of my three years in a poor yet incredibly rich West African country; a story of hope, warmth and positivity in the face of adversity.As a Toubab (Westerner) in Mali, I acquired many new skills: how to deal with persistent street sellers, how to use a ‘long drop’ toilet, surviving malaria and dysentery, enduring a climate constantly hotter than my own body, breaking down hours from anywhere, and making a 17-hour river journey on the roof of an oversized canoe. And all in the aid of ethnomusicology: the science of music in culture. My story closes amidst machine-gun fire, curfews and sudden farewells as the country spirals into chaos following a military coup; not the best weeks my life, but certainly among the most interesting.
Cloth Girl by Marilyn Heward Mills – GHANA
Matilda Quartey is fourteen years old when sophisticated black Gold Coast lawyer, Robert Bannerman, sets eyes on her and resolves to take her as his second wife. For Julie, his first wife, this is a colossal slap in the face: for Matilda it is an abrupt – and cruel – end to childhood. Entwined with their story – by turns funny and heartbreaking – is that of Alan Turton, new ADC to the Governor and his dissatisfied wife, Audrey, a hard-drinking accident waiting to happen, who is appalled by her new life. Marilyn Heward Mills’s Africa is a cauldron of contradictions: fatalistic but brimming with optimism: outwardly Christian, yet profoundly superstitious and reliant on fetish priests: poverty-stricken, but rich in pride and family values: vibrant with colour yet darkened by violence: exhausting, yet exhilarating. For Matilda it is her passionately loved homeland: for Audrey it is a prison. For the men it is a land of opportunity, where careers can be made and broken, fortunes lost and won. And for all of them the events of these ten years will shape and define their lives forever.
In the Company of Men by Veronique Tadjo – WEST AFRICA
Drawing on real accounts of the Ebola outbreak that devastated West Africa, this poignant, timely fable reflects on both the strength and the fragility of life and humanity’s place in the world.
Two boys venture from their village to hunt in a nearby forest, where they shoot down bats with glee, and cook their prey over an open fire. Within a month, they are dead, bodies ravaged by an insidious disease that neither the local healer’s potions nor the medical team’s treatments could cure. Compounding the family’s grief, experts warn against touching the sick. But this caution comes too late: the virus spreads rapidly, and the boys’ father is barely able to send his eldest daughter away for a chance at survival.
In a series of moving snapshots, Véronique Tadjo illustrates the terrible extent of the Ebola epidemic, through the eyes of those affected in myriad ways: the doctor who tirelessly treats patients day after day in a sweltering tent, protected from the virus only by a plastic suit; the student who volunteers to work as a gravedigger while universities are closed, helping the teams overwhelmed by the sheer number of bodies; the grandmother who agrees to take in an orphaned boy cast out of his village for fear of infection. And watching over them all is the ancient and wise Baobab tree, mourning the dire state of the earth yet providing a sense of hope for the future.
Acutely relevant to our times in light of the coronavirus pandemic, In the Company of Men explores critical questions about how we cope with a global crisis and how we can combat fear and prejudice.
Drumbeats by Julia Ibbotson – GHANA
Drumbeats is the first novel in a trilogy. It is 1965 and the air is light with the idea of freedom, love and the Beatles, but eighteen year old Jess is feeling stifled by her puritanical religious family background in working class England, her mother’s narrow-minded Rulebook and rigid plans for her life, and her silent, strangely disturbing father. A feisty young woman with ideas of her own, she plans to defer her university study and instead escape her past to flee to Ghana, West Africa, for a gap year, teaching and nursing in the bush, much to the horror of her parents. In the 60s, Africa means darkness and danger to most people, not least her Quaker family, but to Jess it conjures up a picture of exotic adventure and freedom. Little does she realise what this year will, in fact, bring: joys, horrors, love and tragedy. She must find her way on her own and learn what fate has in store for her, as she becomes embroiled in the poverty and turmoil of the small war-torn African nation under a controversial dictatorship. Jess must face the dangers of both civil war and unexpected romance. But can she escape her troubled past? And why do the drumbeats haunt her dreams?
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite – NIGERIA
When Korede’s dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what’s expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This’ll be the third boyfriend Ayoola’s dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede’s long been in love with him, and isn’t prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other…
Enjoy our selection of great books set in West Africa!
Tony for the TripFiction Team
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