Welcome Readers!
This month the Online Reading Challenge travels to Africa. Our Main title for November is Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Here’s a quick summary from the publisher.
Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.
One of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.
This title is also available in large print, CD audiobook, and as a Libby eBook.
Looking for some other materials set in Africa? Try any of the following. As always, check each of our locations for displays with lots more titles to choose from!
Fiction Picks
- How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
- House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
- The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai
- The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi
- The Impatient by Djaili Amadou Amal
- The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
- The Promise by Damon Galgut
Nonfiction Picks
- Africa’s Child: A Memoir by Maria Nhambu
- African Proverbs and Wisdom by Julia Stewart
- Empires in the Sun by Lawrence James
- My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Sally Hayden
- Olive the Lionheart by Brad Ricca
- The Inheritors by Eve Fairbanks
- The Plot to Save South Africa by Justice Malala