There is a luminescence of words in Umar’s sophomore collection of poetry, an audacity to employ poetic license without boundaries; a rascality, sometimes verging on creative mischief, to explore all perceptive and expressive possibilities.

The Curse of Happiness is a collection of short stories that finds ordinary people struggling and failing in extraordinary circumstances.

From a woman faced with a long waited miracle in “Baby Blue Joy” to a man who finds himself with humanity’s most terrifying manifestation, an enraged mob, in “What is Mine is Yours.”

Yakusak stretches the limits of the normal the perception of of decisions people take in situations beyond their control.

Oluwashola: The Story of Us. This is not just a book. It’s Salt’s life. Her sister, Sholly’s life. Her family’s life. In all it’s perfectly imperfect glory. When her baby sister, Oluwashola (Sholly) Arunrayo Adefolalu Gaska died on December 28, 2016, a part of Salt died along with her. She was going crazy and nobody knew it but the God in her.

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.

Nduka “Kaka” Kabiri’s company is in trouble. A legacy inherited from his late father, Construction Lions Limited will be liquidated after their multi-billion-dollar project in Northeastern Nigeria is seized and destroyed by terrorists.

To save his company, Kaka’s bid must win a World-Bank- sponsored rail project tender. This contract will pay off all his debt and make Kaka one of the richest men in Africa. The stakes are high, and greedy, powerful, dangerous men in the corridors of power—and some close enough to walk the corridors of his own home—will do anything to stop Kaka from winning the rail tender.

Things become dangerous for him when a beautiful seductress, Tsemaye, appears.

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.

From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father.

Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure.

In this extended essay, which originated in a New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the

Growing up in middle-class Lagos, Nigeria during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ihechi forms a band of close friends in his neighborhood. They discover Lagos together as teenagers whose differing ideologies come to the fore over everything from film to football, Fela Kuti to God, sex to politics. They remain close-knit until Ihechi’s girlfriend, is killed in an anti-government riot.

Exiled by his concerned mother, Ihechi moves in with his uncle’s family, where he struggles to find himself outside his former circle of friends. Ihechi eventually finds success by leveraging his connection with a notorious prostitution linchpin and political heavyweight, and earning favor among the ruling elite.

But just as Ihechi is about to make his final ascent into the elite political class, he encounters his childhood friends and experiences a crisis of conscience that forces him to question his motives and who he wants to be.

The journey so far has been a fair balance of both worlds, a frequent taste of two extremes. I have been bold and timid, confident and nervous in the same circumstance. I have dared many instances and I have refrained in many.

Many times I have been down and wanted life to end, and other times I have enjoyed life and wished for more of it. I have probably cried more than most men and in other times, rejoiced more than many. In all these, one thing I can say is, life does not just happen.

Therefore, it might be a bit unfair to hoard the experiences that have birthed answers to some questions not openly asked or topics not easily discussed.

A collection of twelve short stories.

In his second novel, Eghosa Imasuen presents the everyday life of a Nigerian university student against the backdrop of the pro-democracy riots of the 1980s and ?90s, the lost hopes of June 12th, and the terror of the Abacha years.

As first son and graduate, Kingsley Ibe has a load of responsibilities resting on his skinny shoulders. But times are bad in Nigeria, and life is hard. Unable to find work, Kingsley cannot take on the duty of training his younger siblings, nor can he provide his parents with financial peace in their retirement. And then there is Ola his girlfriend, the sugar in Kingsley’s tea. It does not seem to matter that he loves her deeply; he cannot afford her bride price.

This collection is set primarily within Nigeria, and the stories here cover varied social themes including spousal abuse, religious dogma, love, bravery, betrayal and vengeance.