Books

A Nigerian doctoral student, finishing his dissertation, accompanies his American wife to Berlin for her art fellowship. While she paints, he falls in with a community of Africans from Malawi, Senegal and beyond, among them a former doctor working as a nightclub bouncer and a father who fled with his family from an armed rebel in Somalia.

Told in six sections linked by its narrator, who himself loses his papers and ends up in a refugee camp in Italy, Travelers never treats its characters as objects of pity. It is a novel of dislocation and human resilience, and a potent tale for these times.

The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria is a dispatch from the front line. Habila travels to Chibok, a town scarred by burned-out tanks and bullet holes, to understand the 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls and the rise of the group behind it.

He meets families of the kidnapped, reports from camps for displaced people in Maiduguri, and interviews three girls who escaped, bringing a native’s knowledge and a poet’s sensitivity to the story of a wounded town.

Two journalists, young Rufus and his disgraced mentor Zaq, are sent into the Niger Delta to find the kidnapped wife of a British oil executive. Their search leads through oil-slicked rivers, villages destroyed by war and communities evicted by a land-hungry oil company.

Part race-against-the-clock thriller, part political tragedy in the tradition of Graham Greene, this international bestseller lays bare the human and environmental cost of oil, without ever losing sight of the delta’s fragile beauty.

In the late 1970s, twin brothers LaMamo and Mamo Lamang dream of leaving their village for fame and fortune. At sixteen LaMamo runs away to fight with rebel armies across West Africa, while sickly Mamo stays behind and becomes a teacher, and then a chronicler of his people’s history.

A sweeping novel about family, ambition and who gets to tell a nation’s story, built on the conviction that the lives of ordinary people are the real stuff of history.

Lagos in the 1990s, under the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. Lomba, a young arts journalist trying to write a novel in his tenement on Morgan Street, better known as Poverty Street, joins a pro-democracy march and is imprisoned for three years.

Moving back and forth in time and between narrators, Habila’s debut paints an extraordinary portrait of a street, a city and a generation living under repression, and of the stubborn power of words.

A landmark anthology of contemporary short fiction from across the continent and its diaspora, selected and introduced by Habila, bringing a new generation of African writers together with established voices.

New Adventures in African Writing: an anthology of new fiction from African writers, co-edited by Habila and Kadija Sesay.

The British Council’s annual anthology of new fiction, poetry and essays, co-edited by Habila and the poet Lavinia Greenlaw.