Books like God's Bits of Wood
In 1947 and 1948 the African workers on the Dakar to Niger railway go on strike against their French employers, and the women of their towns hold the strike together.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of God's Bits of Wood
Martha Quest
Martha Quest, a restless, bookish girl on a farm in British Central Africa in the 1930s, leaves for the colonial town to find a life of her own.
Weep Not, Child
Njoroge, a boy in colonial Kenya, is the first in his family to go to school, and dreams of education as the Mau Mau rising tears his family apart.
Cities of Salt
In a desert oasis in an unnamed Gulf kingdom in the 1930s, Americans arrive looking for oil, and the oasis, its people and their way of life are swept away.
Arrow of God
A priest in colonial Nigeria tries to maintain his authority and his faith as the British administration systematically dismantles the structures that gave both meaning.
Desert
Two stories braided together: the Blue Men of the Sahara driven north by French colonial troops in 1909 and 1910, and Lalla, a girl descended from them, growing up decades later in a shantytown on the Moroccan coast.
A Grain of Wheat
In a Kenyan village in the days before independence in 1963, the villagers want to honour Mugo, a quiet man they believe was a hero of the Mau Mau struggle.
Savushun
In Shiraz during the Second World War, with foreign armies occupying Iran, Zari watches her husband Yusof, a landowner, refuse to sell his grain to them.
Onitsha
In 1948, twelve-year-old Fintan sails with his Italian mother from France to join the English father he has never met in Onitsha, a trading town on the Niger.
The Moon Is Down
An invading army takes a small coastal mining town in an unnamed northern country almost without a shot, and its colonel tries to run it peacefully through the town's mayor.
Ambiguous Adventure
Samba Diallo, a boy of the Diallobé nobility raised in a strict Quranic school, is sent to the French school and then to Paris, and finds himself caught between two worlds.
Things Fall Apart
A Nigerian village elder watches his world collapse under the weight of British colonialism, losing everything because he cannot bend.
A General Theory of Oblivion
Ludo, an agoraphobic Portuguese woman in Luanda, bricks herself into her apartment on the eve of Angolan independence in 1975 and lives there alone for nearly thirty years.