On the eve of Valentine’s Day, Oghogho ‘Gigi’ Dempster wore her heart on her sleeve. At almost thirty-one, she was single and ready to mingle after nearly two years of relegating her love-life to the curb in favour of growing her fledgling social media company. Her beautiful best friend Alana was newly pregnant for the love of her life, Benjamin Halal, and her sister Efemena ‘Fifi’ was married to wealthy aristocrat, Lotanna Dike.

A young refugee washes up unconscious on the beach of a small island inhabited by no one but Samuel, an old lighthouse keeper. Unsettled, Samuel is soon swept up in memories of his former life on the mainland: a life that saw his country suffer under colonisers, then fight for independence, only to fall under the rule of a cruel dictator; and he recalls his own part in its history. In this new man’s presence he begins to consider, as he did in his youth, what is meant by land and to whom it should belong.

Ebele wishes more than anything to make Christmas with his widowed mother memorable with lots of gifts. With his mother barely able to afford food and the harsh ridicule of his friends, Ebele is disheartened. When a strange man comes to town, the boy opens his heart and home reluctantly.

Peter Idenala’s stable but uninteresting life, as an ambitious young banker, is disrupted when he comes across a book, published as fiction, recounting the torrid experiences he lived through during his days in the university. He is shaken because the writer is Neta Okoye, a girl who broke his heart and dumped him six years before. Peter is forced to revisit his past, to relive his once complicated relationship with Neta and the mistakes that marred their years in school; the friendships they found and lost. 

When the book leads him directly to her, they are faced with a difficult decision: Continue with their emotionally-empty lives, independent of each other, or be together again and confront the trail of past misfortunes that binds them. For Neta, accepting Peter again comes with a promise of happiness, but it also carries the risk of uncovering the secrets she has carried throughout her life. Secrets involving a brother she used to sleep with.

Born in war-torn Liberia, Ma Kemah George has had a series of bad luck in the course of her young life. Among other troubles, she was molested as a child and the only thing that got her through her childhood sane was her best friend, Vincent, who later became her fiancé. Then he died a month after their engagement, and she had to start the next chapter of her life alone as an international student in New York. Her plan was simple. Get over her dead fiancé while getting a master’s degree in the USA. But during her first thirty minutes in the land of the free, she supposedly became engaged to America’s beloved baseball star, Warren McAllister. Now Twitter is going crazy with #whoisMaKemah?

Remi Coker and Nnamdi Okonkwo leave the shores of Nigeria full of hope in search of greener pastures in London. Remi from the prestigious Coker family is expected to return home after her law degree to run the family law firm and Nnamdi, frustrated by the federal university strikes plans to escape Nigeria and never return.

Three Black women are linked in unexpected ways to the same influential white man in Stockholm as they build their new lives in the most open society run by the most private people.

Successful marketing executive Kemi Adeyemi is lured from the U.S. to Sweden by Jonny von Lundin, CEO of the nation’s largest marketing firm, to help fix a PR fiasco involving a racially tone-deaf campaign. A killer at work but a failure in love, Kemi’s move is a last-ditch effort to reclaim her social life.

A chance meeting with Jonny in business class en route to the U.S. propels former model-turned-flight-attendant Brittany-Rae Johnson into a life of wealth, luxury, and privilege—a life she’s not sure she wants—as the object of his unhealthy obsession.

And refugee Muna Saheed, who lost her entire family, finds a job cleaning the toilets at Jonny’s office as she works to establish her residency in Sweden and, more importantly, seeks connection and a place she can call home.

They say fiction is an extension of the factual. Niran Adedokun’s The Law is an Ass, features nine short stories that seem like fictional manifestations of the concerns in his second book, The Danfo Driver in All of Us. In this collection, Niran continues his jeremiad about Nigeria, with stories about sexual shenanigans (both real and imagined), corruption, poverty and deprivation as well as a heady cocktail of other problems that beset a third world country like Nigeria.

Two boys venture into a nearby forest, to hunt for bats and cook their prey over an open fire. Within a month, they are dead, bodies ravaged by an insidious disease. Compounding the family’s grief, experts warn against touching the sick. But this caution comes too late: the virus spreads rapidly.

In a series of moving snapshots, Véronique Tadjo illustrates the terrible extent of the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014, through the eyes of those affected in myriad ways: the doctor who tirelessly treats patients day after day in a sweltering tent; the student who volunteers to work as a gravedigger while universities are closed; the grandmother who agrees to take in an orphaned boy cast out of his village. 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.