14 Must-Read Books Set Under the African Sun

It was Little Bee’s voice that first knocked me out. It’s musical, it’s magical, and it’s joyful. And yet, this sixteen-year-old Nigerian girl has experienced unspeakable horrors. Chris Cleave’s novel is brutal and beautiful at the same time.

In this candid memoir, Alexandra Fuller recounts her childhood spent on a series of farms in southern and central Africa while her father fought on the side of the colonial government in the Rhodesian civil war. Unsentimental, gritty, and often hilarious, it is a captivating portrait of continental and familial unrest.

This family epic set in the Belgian Congo in 1959 is narrated by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist missionary. Told over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa, it is the story of one family and one nation’s tragic undoing.

Born of a secret union between an Indian woman and a British surgeon and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, twin brothers come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.

The Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s is brought to life through the voices of five unforgettable characters. Among them is Ugwu, a houseboy who comes to his master a naive child and ends the novel a wary ex-soldier. As war drags on and the differences between Ugwu and the once-privileged family he serves shrink, their shared, raw humanity is all that remains.

In 1930s South Africa, a young boy experiences firsthand the brutality of racial hatred and comes to learn the hard way how to survive in an unforgiving environment. This fascinating and hopeful novel showcases the power of words to transform lives and the inspiring power of the individual.

Fans around the world adore the bestselling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the basis of the HBO TV show, and its proprietor Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma Ramotswe navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, and good humor—not to mention help from her loyal assistant, Grace Makutsi, and the occasional cup of tea.

When their strict father has to travel for work, four brothers skip school and go fishing. At the ominous nearby river, they meet a dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings. THE FISHERMEN is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990s Nigeria.

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced.

The Sudanese civil war is poignantly rendered through the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee now living in the United States. This moving and expansively human novel reveals the determination of one man as his world collapses around him.

Helene Cooper’s account of her affluent childhood that was suddenly torn apart by a brutal coup d’etat is both a revealing memoir and an examination of Liberian politics. When her family flees to the United States, she undertakes a journey of forgiveness and rediscovery—and finally finds her way back home.

Isak Dinesen’s narrative of her years spent on a 4,000 acre coffee plantation in the hills near Nairobi, from 1914 to 1931, is that of a master storyteller. Written after she had lost her beloved farm and returned to her native Denmark, her account looks back with an unsentimental intelligence to portray a way of life that is now gone forever.

Fashioning the stories of the powerful and the ordinary into a dazzling mosaic, WIZARD OF THE CROW dramatizes with corrosive humor and keenness of observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburirian people. This magnificent novel reveals humanity in all its endlessly surprising complexity.