Five of the best novels of 2022 by African authors
• Writers deliver excellent stories about the continent and the diaspora
If 2021 was a great year for African writing, with Booker Prize winner Damon Galgut and Nobel winner Abdulrazak Gurnah just two of the many African writers bagging the literary world’s most prestigious prizes, 2022 has been a phenomenal follow-up.
Debut writers and seasoned novelists have delivered a plethora of excellent novels, both about the continent and the diaspora, giving readers everywhere a perspective on African countries’ hugely individual and diverse cultures and history.
The Quality of Mercy
Zimbabwe-born novelist and filmmaker Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s work is preoccupied with history, vulnerability and the search for truth. Her latest novel, The Quality of Mercy ,a stand-alone work that acts as a bridge between the first two, The Theory of Flight (2018) and The History of Man (2020), is her most remarkable yet. Clever, compassionate and minutely detailed, it investigates what is inherited when a colonial state transitions into one that is postcolonial.
Dickensian in scope, The Quality of Mercy is set in the City of Kings and its surrounding villages. On the eve of his retirement, Spokes Moloi, a fedora-wearing police officer of spotless integrity, investigates one final crime: the possible murder of Emil Coetzee, head of the sinister Organisation of Domestic Affairs, who disappears on the same day a ceasefire is declared, and the country’s independence beckons.
In following the tangled threads of Coetzee’s life, Spokes raises and resolves mysteries that have haunted him, and his country, for decades under colonial rule. In all this, he is staunchly supported by his paragon of a wife, the lovely Loveness, and his unofficially adopted daughter, the unorthodox postman Dikeledi.
The novel has a huge supporting cast of villagers, guerrillas, neighbours, former soldiers, suburban madams, shopkeepers, would-be politicians and more.
At its heart, The Quality of Mercy examines the past to imagine the future; Ndlovu proposes that ties of kinship and relationships can never be completely broken, and that love can heal even the most grievous of wounds.
Things They Lost
In the compelling, beautifully written debut Things They Lost, by Kenyan novelist Okwiri Odour, 12-year-old Ayosa, whose mother, a global photojournalist, abandons her daughter for unpredictable stretches of time, is left in a crumbling “lurid and vulgar” mansion complete with creaking gates, stone angels, yards overgrown with “tangled balls of thorn trees and wildflowers and barbed wire and stiff yellow grass”.
In this dark family saga about four generations of women Ayosa longs for her mother, herself the daughter and granddaughter of neglectful mothers.
Declaring herself “the loneliest girl in the world”, Ayosa has only a transistor radio and the daily broadcasts of a poet named Ms Temperance to connect her with the wider world. Her companions are the ghostly Fatumas who haunt her house, “creatures of the attic, half girl and half reverie”, pulled from the Indian Ocean by a fisherman 400 years ago.
Set at the intersection of the spirit world and the human one, Things They Lost sets out a rich and magical vision of girlhood. The New York Times describes it as, “alternately whimsical, sweet and dark”, calling it an astonishing debut novel about a lonely girl waiting for her mother that “brims with uncompromisingly African magical realism”.
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
In You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Nigerian writer and National Book Award finalist Akwaeke Emezi, Feyi Adekola is a Nigerian American visual artist living in New York City who is trying to recover from the trauma of widowhood — she lost her husband in a car crash that left her with “intermittent islands of hypertrophied tissue falling like stars down her left leg, a raised and jagged line across her palm, an everlasting bruise on her forearm from when they dragged her out of the car, scraping her across the road”.
The title alone is a winner, taken from the Florence and the Machine song The Hunger, but the writing is equally wonderful. Emezi’s cast of characters — artists and chefs — come alive in an exploration of love, meaning, and contradiction.
Feyi ends her celibacy with Nasir, a man she meets at a rooftop party. Things become complicated when she meets his grieving father and finds that he is someone she can be “alone next to”. But, “because Feyi was Feyi and she was alive, there was no way she could say no”. The novel is an ode to joy, and a life that is possible even against a backdrop of pain and grief.
Here Again Now
In Here Again Now, a novel centring on men of Nigerian heritage, Manchester-based award-winning writer Okechukwu Nzelu has produced an intimate, heartbreakingly beautiful novel about lovers, fathers and sons, in which he examines how people move forward when the past keeps pulling them back.
Achike Okoro is an actor whose career is “taking off at speed”. Ekene, his lifelong friend, and perhaps more, and his troubled father, Chibuike, are “sponging” off him, living in his London flat.
The novel delves into themes of family, fatherhood, homosexuality, repression, vulnerability and more. But after a magical night, when Achike and Ekene come within a hair’s breadth of admitting their feelings for each other, a devastating event rips all three men apart.
In the aftermath, it is Ekene and Chibuike who must try to rebuild. Ultimately, this is a story about fathers and sons, and the power of family — both the one into which we are born and those we choose for ourselves.
The Scent of Burnt Flowers
Blitz Bazawule, author of The Scent of Burnt Flowers, is a multidisciplinary artist born in Ghana. He co-directed Beyoncé’s Black Is King, which earned him a Grammy nomination and his artwork has been featured at the Whitney Biennial in New York City. He is also a TED senior fellow and a Guggenheim fellow.
His debut novel is about a young black couple, Melvin and Bernadette, fleeing persecution in 1960s’ America after a pit stop in the wrong part of town ends with blood on their hands. They seek asylum in Ghana, but with an FBI agent on their trail, fresh dangers and old secrets threaten their newfound freedom.
The couple’s chance encounter with Ghana’s beloved high life musician, Kwesi Kwayson, who is on his way to perform for the president, sparks a journey full of suspense, lust, magic, and danger as Kwame Nkrumah’s regime crumbles around them.
What was meant to be a fresh start spirals into chaos, threatening their relationship and their lives. Kwesi and Bernadette’s undeniable attraction becomes palpable during their three-day trek, and so does Melvin’s intense jealousy. All three must confront one another and their secrets, setting off a series of catastrophic events.
Deeply entrenched in the history of postcolonial West Africa at its intersection with the US Civil Rights Movement, Bazawule’s gripping debut merges political intrigue, magical encounters, and forbidden love. His writing is rich, immersive and poetic.