In the early 1980s, a pharmaceutical company administers an unethical drug trial to residents of the Niger Delta village of Kreektown. When children die as a result, the dominoes of language extinction and cultural collapse begin to topple. Nwokolo moves across time and continents to deliver a novel that speaks to urgent contemporary concerns.
A final tale ignites the meltdown.Dying matriarch, Ma'Kanu, is famous for her stories. Her last wish is to attend her own wake. In her niche of the world, this means a story and song fest. Ostracised on her deathbed by a vengeful community, her depleted wake is kept by a dysfunctional family dogged by a history of incest and patricide. The four tales contributed by foster children who haven't met in years have more truth than fiction, and what began as a bedside game soon becomes deadly serious as close-kept secrets are outed. Then the lady 'dying-in-state' in provoked to tell a tale for the road, revealing family histories that threaten to tear her patchwork family apart. The finale, delivered by her long-time admirer, strips the protection of mystery she had worn all her life. One novel, seven short stories, a new dimension of unputdownable.
Diaries of a Dead African is a merciless comedy that explores the life-threatening situations of three protagonists, the farmer Meme Jumai and his two sons - Abel (failed writer) and Calamatus (aspiring conman). Meme's wife has left him with the bulk of his barn. He has a few tubers to last until harvest. Can he stretch it? Will his friends and relatives help out? Calamatus' break has finally come after an apprenticeship to a con-artist. Can he survive wealth as readily as he did, poverty? Finally Abel's manuscripts are attracting attention, but not, as he discovers, for their literary value... his fondest dreams were on the verge of realisation, yet his father had died at 50 and his brother at 25. How to outlive them both, without fleeing the very opportunities he had craved all his life... www.diariesofadeadafrican.info
A harassed servant plots his grim revenge (A History of Human Servitude)... Sheri puts a potential boyfriend to the test (Man Rating)... Phiri contends for his civil service career (The Fall of Phiri Bombai)...and a politician in his finest hour finds himself possessed by a begoggled demon (The Ghost of Sani Abacha)...26 stories of life and love in the aftermath of autocracy, delivered with wit and insight by one of Africa's most incisive writers.