Books like The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
A nameless railway clerk resists corruption in post-independence Ghana.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Petals of Blood
Four suspects in a murder reveal the story of a Kenyan village devoured by postcolonial capitalism.
A Bend in the River
Salim, from an Indian Muslim family long settled on the East African coast, takes over a shop in a town at the bend of a great river in the African interior, in the years after independence.
No Longer at Ease
Obi Okonkwo, grandson of the Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart, comes home to Lagos from England full of ideals, takes a government job and ends up on trial for taking a bribe.
In a Free State
Linked stories of people adrift in foreign places; in the title novella, two English expatriates drive across an East African country in the middle of a coup.
Doctor Faustus
A German biographer writes during the Reich's collapse about his friend, a composer who contracted for twenty-four years of genius in a Leipzig brothel.
Maps
Askar, an orphan raised by Misra, an Ethiopian woman in the Ogaden, grows up as war comes between Somalia and Ethiopia, and between him and the woman who raised him.
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.
The Interpreters
Five young Nigerian intellectuals home from study abroad, a journalist, an engineer, a lecturer, a painter and a civil servant, meet in the bars of Lagos and Ibadan and try to make sense of the new country.
Mario and the Magician
On holiday at an Italian seaside resort in the late 1920s, a German family goes to the show of Cipolla, a hunchbacked hypnotist who bends his audience to his will.
Nervous Conditions
A Shona girl pursues education in 1960s Rhodesia, confronting colonial and patriarchal barriers.
Seeing
The sequel to Blindness: the city holds an election where every ballot is cast blank, and the government's response reveals that democracy's greatest threat is its own defenders.
Midnight's Children
Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight as India became independent, discovers that he is telepathically linked to the other children born in that hour, and his life becomes tangled with the nation's.