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By : Yvonne Orji
Bamboozled by Jesus
Emmy-nominated actress and comic Yvonne Orji candidly yet humorously shares the twists and turns that eventually led her to success, while seamlessly interweaving a modern-day Biblical blueprint to inspire and empower readers to live their best lives.
Yvonne Orji has never shied away from being unapologetically herself, and that includes being outspoken about her faith. Known for interpreting Biblical stories and metaphors to fit current times, her humorous and accessible approach to faith leaves even non-believers inspired and wanting more.
The way Yvonne sees it, God is a sovereign prankster, punkin’ folks long before Ashton Kutcher made it cool. When she meditates on her own life—complete with unforeseen blessings and unanticipated roadblocks—she realizes it’s one big testimony to how God tricked her into living out her wildest dreams. And she wants us to join in on getting bamboozled. This is not a self-help book—it’s a GET YOURS book!
In Bamboozled by Jesus, a frank and fresh advice book, Orji takes readers on a journey through twenty-four life lessons, gleaned from her own experiences and her favorite source of inspiration: the Bible. But this ain’t your mama’s Bible study. Yvonne infuses wit and heart in sharing pointers like why the way up is sometimes down, and how fear is synonymous to food poisoning. Her joyful, confident approach to God will inspire everyone to catapult themselves out of the mundane and into the magnificent.
With bold authenticity and practical relatability, Orji is exactly the kind of cultural leader we need in these chaotic times. Her journey of getting bamboozled by Jesus paints a powerful picture of what it means to say “yes” to a life you never could’ve imagined—if it wasn’t your own.
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By : Chibundu Onuzo
Sankofa
Masterful in its examination of freedom, prejudice, and personal and public inheritance, Sankofa is a story for anyone who has ever gone looking for a clear identity or home, and found something more complex in its place.
Anna is at a stage of her life when she is beginning to wonder who she really is. She has separated from her husband, her daughter is all grown up, and her mother—the only parent who raised her—is dead.
Searching through her mother’s belongings one day, Anna finds clues about the African father she never knew. His student diaries chronicle his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London. Anna discovers that he eventually became the president—some would say dictator—of a small nation in West Africa. And he is still alive…
When Anna decides to track her father down, a journey begins that is disarmingly moving, funny, and fascinating. Like the metaphorical bird that gives the novel its name, Sankofa expresses the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present to address universal questions of race and belonging, the overseas experience for the African diaspora, and the search for a family’s hidden roots.
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Notes On Grief
From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father.
Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure.
In this extended essay, which originated in a New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the
page—and never without touches of rich, honest humour—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he had stayed connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria.
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By : Yejide Kilanko
Juba And The Fireball
Ten-year-old Juba has a temper and cannot control it. It often starts as a spark in his stomach. After breaking a precious dyeing pot, Juba’s mother sends him to his father’s blacksmith shop where Baami tells Juba a story about a thrown stone and a missing eye.
Juba and the Fireball is a story about family, kindness and respect. How should children manage emotions? Find some of the answers in its pages.
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By : Kunle Shittu
Wahala
Wahala first came to life as a fully-scripted work twenty years ago in my student days at the University of Ibadan. It was a bearded and bespectacled young man’s revolt against conformity, a search for meaning, a toast to love, a damnation of increased fees and draconian policies, a celebration of comradeship over literary banter and beers, a frown at the regimes that treated Nigerians like common denominators in the 90s, an ode to silence, anger and shock at the dramas that just never seemed to end.
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Purple Hibiscus
When Nigeria is shaken by a military coup, Kambili’s father, involved mysteriously in the political crisis, sends her to live with her aunt. In this house, she discovers life and love – and a terrible, bruising secret deep within her family. This extraordinary debut novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of “Half of a Yellow Sun” is about the blurred lines between the old gods and the new, childhood and adulthood, love and hatred – the grey spaces in which truths are revealed and real life is lived.