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.

“We must do something to pass the time, I thought. Two women in a room, hands and feet tied.”

Sabato Rabato aka Soni Dike is a Lagos big boy; a criminal turned grandee, with a beautiful wife, a sea-side mansion and a questionable fortune. Then one day he disappears and his car is found in a ditch, music blaring from the speakers.

A trio of teenage girls, Imabong Nyang, Tonye Femeiya and Ivie Udi, are casualties of the Warri Crisis of 1997.

All three were close friends and classmates who lived in the same neighbourhood at Lower Erejuwa in Warri South Local Government Area of Delta State.

Calamity struck when the crisis heightened in 1997, which took a toll on their families, with each of them losing a blood relative in the most disheartening way.

They reconnect twenty-two years later, in the most awkward circumstances, each nursing the scar from the wounds the crisis inflicted on them.

In this fabulous follow-up to the internationally acclaimed The Lazarus Effect, newspaper reporter Vee Johnson reprieves her role as Cape Town’s most feisty female investigator. Vee and her ever-faithful sidekick, Chlöe Bishop, have been banished from City Chronicle’s newsroom to review a tourist lodge in sleepy Oudtshoorn. But Vee and Chlöe are barely checked in to their rooms when the first body is discovered… hanging from a tree, with Vee’s purple silk scarf used as a noose. But is it suicide or strangulation? As Vee investigates the death, she is pulled into a bewildering world of conferences and corruption, dog-walking and drug addiction, break-ins and black    economic empowerment.

Lagos, January 1976, six years after the Nigerian Civil War. A new military regime has been in power for six months, but rumours are spreading that a counter-coup is imminent. At an art exhibition in the affluent Ikoyi neighbourhood, Remi Lawal, a Nigerian woman who runs her own greeting-card shop, meets Frances Cooke, who introduces herself as an American art dealer, in Nigeria to buy rare beads. They become friends and over the next few weeks confide in each other about their aspirations, loyalties, marriage, motherhood – and Nigeria itself, as hospitable Remi welcomes the enigmatic Frances into her world. Remi’s husband, Tunde, naturally suspects Frances – like any American in Lagos – of gathering intelligence for the CIA, yet she is unconvinced. Cynical about the country’s unending instability, and alienated by the shallowness of the city’s elite, she willingly shares her views with Frances. But the February 13 assassination of General Muhammed prompts Remi to reconsider one particular conversation with her new acquaintance in a different light.

On her deathbed, Leona seeks forgiveness by confessional. Dastardly as the sin is, it is an act of love, loyalty, disobedience, and perceived fairness. How did she get here, where she, an internationally renowned model, is forced to kill her father-in-law to avenge her mother’s death?

Guy Collins, a British hack, is hunting for an election story in Lagos.

Alaere Benson is your typical modern, professional woman in search of that elusive work-life balance and societal acceptance in Lagos. When she gets a job at Criole, she is excited to be working for a multinational company, but it does not take long for her to see that Criole is dysfunctional and bears an eerie similarity to Nigeria. As she struggles to find her footing in her new role, she witnesses a never-ending theatre of murder, sexual harassment and mysticism.

Face Me I Face You is a collection of poems existing at the interface of identity, class, and African culture. It holds a mirror to the working class by capturing the narrative essence and dramatized aspirations of its characters. The deployed humor fondly humanizes our modern realities and reaches beyond the tragedy of these colorful archetypes of city life.