The Famished Road

Author	Sefi Atta
ISBN	1844370569

Everything Good Will Come introduces an important new voice in contemporary fiction. It is 1971, a year after the Biafran War, and Nigeria is under military rule—though the politics of the state matter less than those of her home to Enitan Taiwo, an eleven-year-old girl tired of waiting for school...

Author

J.G. Farrell

India, 1857--the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.

Farrell's story...

Author	Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
ISBN	1582430152

Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an important English civil servant. Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a...

Author

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

From the exiled Kenyan novelist, playwright, poet, and literary critic--a magisterial comic novel that is certain to take its place as a landmark of postcolonial African literature.

In exile now for more than twenty years, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has become one of the most widely read African...

Author

J.M. Coetzee

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael...

Author	Penelope Fitzgerald
ISBN	0006542565

On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river’s tides. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they cling to one another in a motley yet kindly society. There is...

Author	Paul Scott
ISBN	0099443198

Tusker and Lily Smalley stayed on in India. Given the chance to return 'home' when Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, retired, they chose instead to remain in the small hill town of Pangkot, with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the days of the Empire. Only the tyranny...

Author

Kingsley Amis

Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining,...

Author	Nadine Gordimer
ISBN	0140047166

Money doesn't buy happiness, and happiness doesn't buy safety.

During the South Africa's apartheid period, "Mehring" is one of many white business men, industrialist, powerful, very wealthy. In a sudden lordship impulse he acquires a country house, to escape the city on weekends. His life...

Author	Flora Nwapa
ISBN	0435900269

Published in 1966, this apparently was the first book written by a Nigerian woman to be published (this is from Wiki so take with a pinch of salt). It is set in the same area and tradition as Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The blurb with the book sums it up;
“Efuru, beautiful and respected, is loved...

Author	Wole Soyinka
ISBN	0375755144

The first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as a political activist of prodigious energies, Wole Soyinka now follows his modern classic Ake: The Years of Childhood with an equally important chronicle of his turbulent life as an adult in (and in exile from) his beloved, beleaguered...

Author	Graham Swift
ISBN	0330489674

Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea. For reasons best known to herself, Jack's widow, Amy, declines to join them. On the surface the tale of a simple if increasingly bizarre day's outing, Last Orders is Graham...

Author	Amos Tutuola
ISBN	0802133630

When Amos Tutuola's first novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, appeared in 1952, it aroused exceptional worldwide interest. Drawing on the West African Yoruba oral folktale tradition, Tutuola described the odyssey of a devoted palm-wine drinker through a nightmare of fantastic adventure. Since then,...

Author	Penelope Lively
ISBN	0802135331

The elderly Claudia Hampton, a best-selling author of popular history; lies alone in a London hospital bed. Memories of her life still glow in her fading consciousness, but she imagines writing a history of the world. Instead, Moon Tiger is her own history, the life of a strong, independent woman, with...

Author	William Golding
ISBN	0571209432

Well, William Golding, sir. You achieved something that not many men have done. You brought me very close to tears.
This novel really produced an amazingly strong emotional response in me. Odd, in that it keeps the reader at arm's length for much of Edmund Talbot's narrative. Young William is a prig...

Author	Bernice Rubens
ISBN	0349130221

Norman is the clever one of a close-knit Jewish family in the East End of London. Infant prodigy; brilliant barrister; the apple of his parents' eyes... until at forty-one he becomes a drug addict, confined to his bedroom, at the mercy of his hallucinations and paranoia.

For Norman, his committal...

Author	Barry Unsworth
ISBN	0393311147

Sacred Hunger is a stunning and engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed. Filled with the "sacred hunger" to expand its empire and its profits, England entered full into the slave trade and spread the trade throughout its colonies. In this Booker Prize-winning work, Barry Unsworth...

Author

James Kelman

One Sunday morning in Glasgow, shoplifting ex-con Sammy awakens in an alley, wearing another man's shoes and trying to remember his two-day drinking binge. He gets in a scrap with some soldiers and revives in a jail cell, badly beaten and, he slowly discovers, completely blind. And things get worse:...

Author	Stanley Middleton
ISBN	0907123430

Edwin Fisher is on holiday at the English seaside - but this revisiting of childhood haunts is no ordinary holiday. Edwin is seeking to understand the failure of his marriage to Meg, but it turns out that her parents are staying at the same resort - whether by accident or design - and are keen to patch up the...

Author	John Berger
ISBN	0679736549

In this luminous novel — winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize — John Berger relates the story of "G.," a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of this century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and...

Author	P.H. Newby
ISBN	0571243258

P. H. Newby's seventeenth novel Something To Answer For was assured of a place in literary history when it won the inaugural Booker Prize in 1969.

It was 1956 and Townrow was in Port Said - of these two facts he is reasonably certain. He had been summoned by the widow of his deceased friend Elie Khoury....

Author	David Storey
ISBN	0380018896

Saville centers around Colin, a young boy growing up in the fictional Yorkshire mining village of Saxton during the Second World War and the postwar years.

This is the story of a miner's son, and his growth from the 1930s on, his rise in the world by way of grammar school and college. At first there...

Author	V.S. Naipaul
ISBN	1400030552

No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread,...

Author	Ayi Kwei Armah
ISBN	2911928040

Apart from Things Fall Apart - The Healers - is probably one of the boldest attempts in African Literature to re-imagine the African past with a vividness and directness that speaks to contemporary African lives. A book of impressive depth and characterisation, it depicts Ghanaian/Ashanti civilization...