Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books by Chika Unigwe, Netonon Noel Ndjékéry, Kagiso Lesego Molope, and Mordecai O. Ogada.
Grace by Chika Unigwe
Publisher: Canongate Books
Publication Date: January 15, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Canongate Books
Chika Unigwe
Chika Unigwe is Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia College and the author of several celebrated works of fiction, including On Black Sisters’ Street, which won the NLNG Prize for Literature, and, most recently, the short story collection Better Never Than Late and the novel The Middle Daughter.
Grace
It is Baby’s birthday, but Grace has not seen her firstborn in twenty-six years. Now a wife, mother to twin daughters, and the owner of a successful medical clinic, Grace has carefully constructed a new life. And now, the secret she’s kept for decades is about to resurface – and it could destroy everything.
Grace was only fifteen when she got pregnant and, under pressure from her parents, gave Baby away. Unable to forgive their decision, she cut them off completely. Now, when Grace’s estranged mother walks back into her life unannounced, the fragile existence she spent years building begins to unravel.
Grace is a story about motherhood, finding meaning for yourself and fighting for the people that you love.
La Fabrique du Merveilleux by Netonon Noel Ndjékéry
Publisher: Hélice Hélas
Publication Date: January 14, 2026
Genre: Fiction
Language: French
Where to find it: Hélice Hélas
Netonon Noel Ndjékéry
Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry was born in Moundou, Chad, and began his writing career with a short story published by Radio France Internationale. He now lives on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. To date, he has authored six novels, including Au petit bonheur la brousseand Il n’y a pas d’arc-en-ciel au Paradis(winner of the 2022 Hors Concours Prize, the 2022 Grand Literary Prize of Black Africa, and the 2023 Lettres Frontière Prize), published by Hélice Hélas Éditeur in 2019 and 2022. In 2017, he received the Grand Literary Prize of Chad for his entire body of work. His works have been translated into English, Arabic, and Serbian.
La Fabrique du Merveilleux
Long ago, in the distant principality of Lara, a young courtesan rose meteorically to power in the monarch’s court. Within a few moons, her control of the kingdom was absolute and undeniable. However, in the primeval forest, raw dreams were being forged, ready to be delivered to humankind. Dreams of freedom, brimming with color, wonder, and magic—dreams capable of overthrowing tyrants and banishing nightmares and darkness. Through this fable, Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry offers a subtle reflection on democracy and the challenges of maintaining it.
We Inherit the Fire By Kagiso Lesego Molope
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House
Kagiso Lesego Molope
Kagiso Lesego Molope is an Indigenous novelist and playwright of the San people of Southern Africa. She is the author of four other novels: Dancing in the Dust, which was on the IBBY Honour List for 2006; The Mending Season; Such a Lonely, Lovely Road; and This Book Betrays My Brother. She has been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award four times. She is the winner of the 2014 Percy FitzPatrick Award, the 2019 Ottawa Book Award for Fiction, and the 2019 inaugural Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award. Across Southern Africa and in parts of Europe, her works are read in schools in several languages. She wrote the play Maya Angelou: Black Woman Rising, which was staged for five years at Oslo’s Nordic Black Theatre. She lives on the unceded and unsurrendered Anishinaabe Algonquin territory.
We Inherit the Fire
A gorgeously rendered, unflinching portrait of the fractured relationship between a mother and her daughter—set against the tumultuous end of apartheid in South Africa.
There is that photograph, of course. My mother: standing in front of a soldier, closer than anyone else would dare…
In late-1980s South Africa, teenager Kelelo is forced to leave her mountain school for a newly desegregated school in town, where her identity as the daughter of celebrated freedom fighter Kewame “Dolly” Malaka makes her an instant curiosity. While her classmates see her as a symbol of progress, at home she struggles with a mother who is emotionally unreachable, still haunted by the violence and deprivation she endured as a political prisoner under apartheid.
Kewame, now living in material comfort, hides a growing inner collapse as memories of prison life and the women who sustained her resurface, stirred by her grandmother’s illness and the pressure of maintaining a façade of perfection. As mother and daughter navigate a shifting political landscape, We Inherit the Fire interlaces their voices to reveal the unspoken wounds, buried histories, and complex inheritance of resilience, pain, and responsibility that bind and divide generations of Black South African women.
Green and Evil: The New Empires and their Regents by Mordecai O. Ogada
Publisher: Lens & Pens Publishing
Publication Date: October 29, 2025
Genre: Nonfiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Amazon, Nuria
Mordecai Ogada
Dr. Mordecai Ogada is a Kenyan carnivore ecologist and conservation policy scholar with over 25 years experience in Kenya and other parts of Africa, mainly on human-wildlife conflict issues. His current work focuses on the challenges of racism and other prejudices in the global conservation arena. He also researches and writes extensively on the ethical challenges of the global climate movement, including the protection of the ownership rights of indigenous people in the Global South over their natural heritage. Dr. Ogada lives in Nanyuki, Kenya, and is a keen student of African socio-political history.
Green and Evil: The New Empires and their Regents
The effects of climate change are beginning to manifest in extreme weather events like floods, droughts and temperature rises all over the world. In addition to that, untrammeled resource exploitation has accelerated the rate of biodiversity loss to alarming levels. ‘Green and Evil’ explores how the age-old forces of piracy, greed, capitalism and imperialism have come together to exploit what is seen by individuals, societies and nations as an existential crisis. The growth of ‘climate finance’, carbon trade, carbon offsets, and other financial instruments is fast overtaking the pace of actual reduction of emissions, which is what the environment needs. In tropical Africa, Asia, and other parts of the Global South, the capitalist driven ‘conservationists’ have usurped state agencies to facilitate the dumping of European toxic wastes and violent disenfranchisement of people to create room for hunting playgrounds, protected areas, and carbon trading agreements. This book offers an intellectual escape from the dark, imperial histories behind the ‘altruistic’ saviour complex we see in western environmentalism today. It also calls for a deliberate effort to define our environmental realities at higher resolution and reject the environmental globalism that currently serves the objectives of the greediest amongst us.
Leave a Reply