Literary Fiction

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Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions

Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions

Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi

Spanning more than 150 years, from 1897 to an imagined 2050, Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions follows generations of Nigerian women as they navigate friendship, family, ambition, and the struggle to determine their own futures. Moving between Nigeria and the United States, the interconnected stories explore how personal choices and historical events shape women’s lives across generations. At the heart of the collection are Nonso, Remi, Aisha, and Solape, four girls who form a powerful bond while attending an all-girls boarding school in Nigeria during the 1980s. Their friendship is tested when they participate in a rebellion against their school’s principal, an event whose consequences continue to affect them long after they leave adolescence behind. As the women grow older, their lives take different directions. Nonso moves to the United States and falls in love with an African American man, discovering new possibilities alongside the challenges of building a life between cultures. Remi confronts painful family experiences while navigating love and relationships, while Aisha struggles with guilt over the events of their schooldays. Their stories extend into the lives of their relatives and descendants, revealing how the past continues to shape the present. Through its shifting perspectives and leaps across time, Ogunyemi’s debut explores the complicated relationships between women, the consequences of silence, and the meaning of belonging. It offers a nuanced portrait of Nigerian women’s experiences, examining how friendship, family loyalty, and the pursuit of independence can become sources of both strength and conflict.

Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?

Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?

Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

Yinka Oladeji is a thirty-one-year-old, Oxford-educated British Nigerian woman with a good job, close friends, and a loving—but rather intrusive—family. There is just one thing everyone seems to think is missing from her life: a husband. Her Nigerian mother and aunties constantly question her relationship status, while her friends believe she needs to move on from her ex and reconsider her traditional views on love. Although Yinka has always believed that love will arrive when the time is right, her cousin Rachel’s engagement prompts her to take matters into her own hands. Determined to find a date for Rachel’s wedding, she launches Operation Find a Date, complete with spreadsheets, carefully calculated strategies, and the help of her best friend. But as she navigates the dating scene, Yinka begins to question whether changing herself to meet other people’s expectations will really bring her happiness. Through Yinka’s romantic misadventures, Blackburn explores the pressures placed on unmarried women, the complexities of navigating British and Nigerian cultural expectations, and the influence of colourism on self-esteem and relationships. With humour and warmth, the novel examines the tension between family loyalty and personal independence, ultimately asking whether finding love begins with finding someone else—or learning to accept yourself.

Love and Only Water

Love and Only Water

Can you be whole when your world is in halves? Twenty-one-year-old Daniela travels from England to Cyprus in search of her roots and a stronger sense of identity. Staying at her grandparents’ home, she becomes increasingly aware of the pain her family carries from Turkey’s 1974 invasion of northern Cyprus. The island’s division is not merely political: it has shaped family memories, personal relationships, and the ways people understand their own histories. When Daniela’s aunt invites her across the border for a picnic, Daniela unexpectedly encounters Beyza, her former girlfriend. Five years earlier, the two women had lived in London, sharing a connection that seemed possible beyond the boundaries of their cultural backgrounds. Now, with Daniela in the Greek Cypriot south and Beyza in the Turkish Cypriot north, their reunion forces them to confront the religious, cultural, and political differences that separate them. As Daniela navigates her feelings for Beyza and the complicated history of her family, she begins to question what it means to belong to a place, a culture, or another person. Through the parallel divisions of a family and an island, Love and Only Water explores sexuality, cultural identity, inherited trauma, and the uncertainty of living between worlds.

Honor

Indian American journalist Smita returns to India to report on a disturbing case involving Meena, a Hindu woman who has been brutally attacked by her own family for marrying Abdul, a Muslim man. As Smita investigates the violence committed in the name of family honour, she encounters a society where religious divisions, patriarchal traditions, and social expectations can override individual freedom. While trying to help Meena, Smita also confronts painful memories of her own past and develops an unexpected connection with Mohan, an Indian man whose presence challenges her carefully constructed emotional distance. Through the intersecting lives of these women, Thrity Umrigar explores the cost of defying tradition, the meaning of belonging, and the courage required to live according to one’s convictions. Honor is a moving novel about love, religious intolerance, and the struggle for women’s autonomy in a deeply divided society.

Either/Or

It’s 1996, and Harvard sophomore Selin Karadağ is determined to turn her life into something worthy of a novel. Still trying to make sense of her complicated feelings for Ivan, the elusive Hungarian student she fell for the previous year, Selin turns to literature and philosophy for answers about love, desire, and how to live. Inspired by her reading of Kierkegaard and guided by the messy experiences of university life, she experiments with sex, relationships, parties, and independence. When she travels to Turkey, the country of her family’s heritage, her understanding of herself begins to shift. Witty, thoughtful, and painfully relatable, Either/Or captures the exhilarating uncertainty of becoming an adult and learning to write your own story.

United States 2022

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

In the aftermath of Egypt’s Arab Spring, two strangers meet in a Cairo café: an Egyptian photographer haunted by the revolution and an Egyptian American woman searching for a connection to a homeland she has never truly known. Their attraction grows into an intense relationship shaped by desire, cultural misunderstanding, and unequal power. As each tries to remake themselves through the other, the boundaries between intimacy and exploitation begin to blur. Told through an experimental, fragmented narrative, Noor Naga’s unsettling novel challenges conventional ideas about identity, belonging, and who has the right to claim a place. Both a provocative love story and a sharp examination of postcolonial power, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English asks whether returning to one’s roots is ever as simple as coming home.

The Furrows

Namwali Serpell

“I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” When Cassandra Williams, known as C, is twelve years old, her seven-year-old brother, Wayne, disappears during a swimming accident. His body is never found, leaving C trapped in a grief complicated by guilt and unanswered questions. Their mother refuses to abandon hope and dedicates herself to searching for missing children, while their father eventually leaves the family. As C grows older, the loss refuses to remain in the past: she begins seeing Wayne everywhere, recognising his face in strangers on trains, in cafés, and in crowded streets. Then she meets a man who shares her brother’s name and seems connected to the mystery of her loss. Moving between perspectives and shifting versions of reality, Namwali Serpell explores how grief distorts memory and how the stories we tell ourselves can become inseparable from what we believe to be true. Both intimate and formally adventurous, The Furrows is a haunting meditation on sibling love, racial identity, and the impossible desire to recover those we have lost.

United States 2022

Dawn

On a hot night in Adana, southern Turkey, a gathering of friends is interrupted when police storm into a private home and arrest those suspected of opposing the government. Among them is Oya, a journalist recently released from prison and forced into exile for her left-wing political beliefs. As the detainees are interrogated, their stories unfold, revealing the fear, compromises, and quiet acts of resistance that define life under military repression. Through the experiences of workers, intellectuals, women, and even the officials enforcing the law, Sevgi Soysal exposes a society where power can turn ordinary people into both victims and perpetrators. Yet darkness does not extinguish every possibility of solidarity. With sharp humour and an unsentimental eye, Soysal explores how people preserve their dignity when their freedom is threatened. Inspired by her own experience of political imprisonment, Dawn is a powerful portrait of resistance, gender inequality, and the fragile hope that survives even in the most oppressive circumstances.

The Last Days of Terranova

The Last Days of Terranova

What if a bookstore could preserve everything the world is trying to forget? In 2014, Vicenzo Fontana faces the imminent closure of Terranova, his family’s beloved bookstore, threatened by property developers after decades of serving as a refuge for dissidents, exiles, and forbidden books. Spending one final night among its shelves, the elderly bookseller revisits the people and events that shaped his life and the history of the shop. His memories lead back to 1935, when his father first opened Terranova, and forward through the Spanish Civil War’s legacy, Franco’s dictatorship, and the turbulent years of political resistance. Among the bookstore’s visitors are idealists, rebels, writers, and people fleeing persecution, each carrying a story of their own. Blending literary allusions, political history, and poetic storytelling, Manuel Rivas creates a moving tribute to books as vessels of memory and instruments of resistance. As Terranova faces its final hours, the novel asks what we lose when the places that protect ideas and shelter outsiders disappear.

Ti Amo

Hanne Ørstavik

Can love survive when the person you love is disappearing before your eyes? In this intimate, autobiographical novel, a woman in her fifties discovers that her husband has cancer. As they confront his illness together, their shared life takes on a new intensity, and ordinary moments become charged with tenderness, fear, and impending loss. The Italian words ti amo—“I love you”—become a quiet expression of devotion in the face of something neither of them can control. Through spare, precise prose, Hanne Ørstavik explores the strange isolation of caring for someone who is dying, the vulnerability of the body, and the ways love changes when time becomes painfully limited. Neither sentimental nor detached, the novel captures the contradictions of grief before death has even arrived: the desire to hold on, the exhaustion of caregiving, and the desperate wish to make every remaining moment count.

Yñiga

Yñiga Calinauan leads a quiet, unremarkable life in Manila until a retired army general accused of murdering peasants and political activists is arrested across the street from her home. Days later, her neighbourhood is burned to the ground, in what some suspect is retaliation. Forced to flee, Yñiga returns to M—, the small fishing town where she grew up, hoping to recover the peaceful existence she has lost. But the violence she thought she had escaped follows her, drawing her into a history of political repression and family trauma that she can no longer ignore. As the boundaries between her past and present begin to collapse, Yñiga must confront the legacy of her activist father, who disappeared years earlier, and the unresolved wounds that continue to shape her family. Blending political thriller, dark humour, and literary fiction, Glenn Diaz’s novel examines the enduring consequences of state violence in the Philippines. Against a landscape haunted by disappearances and historical injustice, it explores the possibility of resistance—not only through dramatic acts of rebellion, but also through the determination to remember, endure, and refuse silence.

Philippines 2022

Time of the Flies

Time of the Flies

Claudia Piñeiro

The Time of the Flies follows Inés, a woman rebuilding her life after spending fifteen years in prison for murdering her former husband’s lover. Released into a society that has changed considerably during her imprisonment, Inés struggles to understand the new social landscape, including shifting attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and women’s rights. She establishes a small fumigation business with another formerly imprisoned woman, hoping to achieve independence and leave her troubled past behind. However, an unexpected request draws her into a new mystery that threatens the fragile stability she has created. Blending crime fiction, dark humour, and social commentary, Piñeiro explores punishment, reintegration, and the difficulties women face when attempting to begin again. The novel asks whether freedom is simply the absence of prison walls or the more complicated ability to shape one’s own future.

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