Recommendations based on "Timbuktu"

'A tender and touching love story, beautifully told' Observer 10 Best Debut Novelists of 2021'A beautiful and powerful novel about the true and sometimes painful depths of love' Candice Carty-Williams, bestselling author of QUEENIE'An unforgettable debut... it's Sally Rooney meets Michaela Coel meets Teju Cole' New York Times'A love song to Black art and thought' Yaa Gyasi, bestselling author of HOMEGOING and TRANSCENDENT KINGDOMTwo young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.'An amazing debut novel. You should read this book. Let's hear it for Caleb Azumah Nelson, also known as the future' Benjamin Zephaniah'A very touching and heartfelt book' Diana Evans, award-winning author of ORDINARY PEOPLE'A lyrical modern love story, brilliant on music and art, race and London life, I enjoyed it hugely' David Nicholls, author of ONE DAY and SWEET SORROW'Caleb is a star in the making' Nikesh Shukla, editor of THE GOOD IMMIGRANT and BROWN BABY'A stunning piece of art' Bolu Babalola, bestselling author of LOVE IN COLOUR'For those that are missing the tentative depiction of love in Normal People, Caleb Azumah Nelson's Open Water is set to become one of 2021's unmissable books. Utterly transporting, it'll leave you weeping and in awe.' Stylist'An exhilarating new voice in British fiction' Vogue'A poetic novel about Black identity and first love in the capital from one of Britain's most exciting young voices' Harper's Bazaar'An intense, elegant debut' Guardian

A masterful, intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that deep friendships can provide - from the Booker-shortlisted, Pulitzer prize-winning author of THE RETURNKhaled and Mustafa meet at university in two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed.Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.'I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice' Elif Shafak

In the spring of 1938, Teodor Mykolayenko returns to his family after nearly two years in prison for the crime of trying to feed them. Given shelter by his sister Anna, his wife, Maria, and their five children barely survived on the harsh and brutal Canadian prairie landscape. Channelling a determination gained from escaping starvation and Stalin's crimes in the Ukraine, Teodor is committed to making a home. With unbending resolve, he takes to the land and as the crops grow, his family heals and strengthens, but their comfort is soon challenged: Anna's rogue husband returns with an unforgivable plan. Mesmerizing and passionate, Under This Unbroken Sky is an astonishing tale of family, love, betrayal, and the resiliency of the human spirit.

Based on interviews with young women who were kidnapped by Boko Haram, this poignant novel by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani tells the timely story of one girl who was taken from her home in Nigeria and her harrowing fight for survival. Includes an afterword by award-winning journalist Viviana Mazza.A new pair of shoes, a university degree, a husband—these are the things that a girl dreams of in a Nigerian village. And with a government scholarship right around the corner, everyone can see that these dreams aren’t too far out of reach.But the girl’s dreams turn to nightmares when her village is attacked by Boko Haram, a terrorist group, in the middle of the night. Kidnapped, she is taken with other girls and women into the forest where she is forced to follow her captors’ radical beliefs and watch as her best friend slowly accepts everything she’s been told.Still, the girl defends her existence. As impossible as escape may seem, her life—her future—is hers to fight for.

The urgent and unforgettable true story of post-Katrina New Orleans . . .In August 2005, as Hurricane Katrina blew in, the city of New Orleans has been abandoned by most citizens. But resident Abdulrahman Zeitoun, though his wife and family had gone, refused to leave. For days he traversed an apocalyptic landscape of flooded streets by canoe. But eventually he came to the attention of those 'guarding' this drowned city. Only then did Zeitoun's nightmare really begin.Zeitoun is the powerful, ultimately uplifting true story of one man's courage when confronted with an awesome force of nature followed by more troubling human oppression.

From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil warFor more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.

Tandia is a child of all Africa: half Indian, half African, beautiful and intelligent, she is only sixteen when she is first brutalised by the police. Her fear of the white man leads her to join the black resistance movement, where she trains as a terrorist. With her in the fight for justice is the one white man Tandia can trust, the welterweight champion of the world, Peekay. Now he must fight their common enemy in order to save both their lives.

“Condé’s story is rich and colorful and glorious. It sprawls over continents and centuries to find its way into the reader’s heart.” —Maya Angelou“A wondrous novel” (The New York Times) by the winner of the 2018 New Academy Prize (The Alternative Nobel prize in literature) and author of The Gospel According to the New WorldThe year is 1797, and the kingdom of Segu is flourishing, fed by the wealth of its noblemen and the power of its warriors. The people of Segu, the Bambara, are guided by their griots and priests; their lives are ruled by the elements. But even their soothsayers can only hint at the changes to come, for the battle of the soul of Africa has begun. From the east comes a new religion, Islam, and from the West, the slave trade. Segu follows the life of Dousika Traore, the king’s most trusted advisor, and his four sons, whose fates embody the forces tearing at the fabric of the nation. There is Tiekoro, who renounces his people’s religion and embraces Islam; Siga, who defends tradition, but becomes a merchant; Naba, who is kidnapped by slave traders; and Malobali, who becomes a mercenary and halfhearted Christian. Based on actual events, Segu transports the reader to a fascinating time in history, capturing the earthy spirituality, religious fervor, and violent nature of a people and a growing nation trying to cope with jihads, national rivalries, racism, amid the vagaries of commerce.

St Matthias Mission 1902: 'There are men who know that when you are finished with this war of yours and have raised your flag to the glory of your Empire - the one that we, as black men, are supposed to revere for having bestowed on us education, faith, prosperity and all the other high-sounding gifts - that you will sell us out - perhaps against the advance of metaphorical cattle - and say it is expedient. You will sacrifice our rights in order to secure your peace with the Boers and shrug us off. It is for this expedience that men like Tom and Reuben and Sonwabo Pumami are dead. There will be thousands like them in the time to come. ' Against a backdrop of drought, the rinderpest pandemic, the South African War, the burgeoning gold-mining industry and the complex birth of the exploitative system of recruiting migrant labour, Shades explores the growing tensions between cultures in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century and the deepening awareness of the black mission-educated elite, empowered by the printing press, of the need to articulate their political and spiritual beliefs. Set within the microcosm of an isolated Eastern Cape mission, Shades is not only a love story and the chronicle of a family but a sensitive and perceptive insight into the country's wider conflicts. It explores the slow but inexorable destruction of the fabric of a community, the assault on its traditions and the struggle to reconcile two faiths: the Christian and the traditional beliefs of the amaXhosa in their ancestral shades. It is the story of those far-sighted enough to seek convergence and those destined to undermine its wisdom. Primarily, Shades is an intimate tale of love, friendship, acceptance and profound loss: of life, of faith and of belonging.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 'Vivid and empowering' GILLIAN ANDERSON 'A stunning book' BERNARDINE EVARISTO 'Dazzling' TARA WESTOVER 'A story about hope, imagination and resilience' GUARDIAN An award-winning, inspiring memoir of family, education and resilience. Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where luxury hotels line pristine white sand beaches, Safiya Sinclair grew up guarding herself against an ever-present threat. Her father, a volatile reggae musician and strict believer in a militant sect of Rastafari, railed against Babylon, the corrupting influence of the immoral Western world just beyond their gate. To protect the purity of the women in their family he forbade almost everything. Her mother did what she could to bring joy to her children with books and poetry. But as Safiya's imagination reached beyond its restrictive borders, her burgeoning independence brought with it ever greater clashes with her father. Soon she realised that if she was to live at all, she had to find some way to leave home. But how? How to Say Babylon is an unforgettable story of a young woman's determination to live life on her own terms. A Guardian and Observer summer read. 'I adored this book ... Unforgettable' ELIF SHAFAK 'Electrifying' OBSERVER 'To read it is to believe that words can save' MARLON JAMES 'Breathless, scorching' NEW YORK TIMES