Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books from Tierno Monénembo, Saara El-Arifi, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, and Remilekun Anikulapo-Kuti.
The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura by Tierno Monénembo
Publisher: Schaffner Press
Date: March 4, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English (Translated from French by Ryan Chamberlain)
Where to find it: Schaffner Press
Tierno Monénembo
A winner of some of France’s most prestigious awards, including the Prix Renaudot and the Grand Prix de la francophonie, Guinean-born (1947) author Tierno Monénembo most recently received the 2022 Baobab Prize for Best African/Diasporic Work of Literature for his novel, The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura. A refugee from Guinean dictator Ahmed Sékou Touré’s regime, Monénembo migrated to France to earn a PhD in Biochemisty. He has lived in Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, the US, and now, a professor, in France, and currently makes Paris his home.
Ryan Chamberlain
Ryan Chamberlain holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas, where he currently teaches French. With Carolyn F. Walton Cole Fellowships in both fiction and translation, he has worked as a subtitler for TV5Monde and served as Translation Editor for The Arkansas International.
The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura
In this gripping novel set in both French Guinea and Paris, award-winning author (The King of Kahel) Tierno Monénembo explores themes of international exile, sexual abuse, generational trauma and repressed memory of a people and country under the regime of dictator Sekou Toure from 1956-1982 in which 50,000 people were reported killed or disappeared. With his title character Véronique Bangoura, Monénembo provides a portrait of a powerful female protagonist living under an assumed name in exile, having fled her native country to take on a new identity and occupation as caregiver for an elderly and infirm gentleman. Prompted by a friendship she has struck up with an older woman who claims to recognize her, she finds a confidante to whom she relates her personal story, when as a young teenager she killed her father in self-defense upon his attempt to rape her, and fled into the slums of Conakry where she was taken in by a gang of women and their matriarch, Aye Bamby, who mentors her in a life of petty crime and prostitution. In this complexly unwinding plot told in alternating parallel narratives, the dark political history of her parentage as well as the truth behind her many lives is revealed.
We, the Kindling by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Date: February 4, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House Canada
Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
Otoniya J. Okot Bitek is an Acholi poet. Her most recent book, A is for Acholi (Wolsak and Wynn, 2022) was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her previous collection, 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016), reflected on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide and was nominated for the BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the Alberta Book Award and the Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the IndieFab Book of the Year Award for Poetry and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Otoniya has been a Poetry Ambassador for the City of Vancouver, and in the fall of 2020 she was the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. She was also a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the spring of 2021. She is currently an assistant professor of Black Creativity at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
We, the Kindling
A concise, searing novel centred around the unforgettable voices of schoolgirls in Uganda who survive capture by the Lord’s Resistance Army.
In northern Uganda in the 1990s, girls as young as eleven were abducted from schools and homes by the Lord’s Resistance Army and thrust into the horrors of war. Facing long, perilous treks, gun battles, and underage marriages, while forced to be pawns in political machinations they did not understand, many did not survive. Those who did make it through continue to bear the physical and psychological weight of these terrors.
As We, the Kindling begins, we meet Miriam and Helen, two survivors who are now in their twenties but haunted by their years in forced servitude to the Army. In spare, graceful, yet unflinching prose the novel weaves past with present, layering folk tales with taut realism to reveal the rhythm of the girls’ lives before the war, unspooling the circumstances of their abductions and tracing their harrowing journeys home again. Reminiscent of The Buddha in the Attic, this is a luminous novel, full of life and care, that insistently refuses to spectacularize brutality and tragedy.
Cursebound By Saara El-Arifi
Publisher: Del Rey
Date: February 18, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House
Saara El-Arifi
Saara El-Arifi is the internationally bestselling author of The Ending Fire Trilogy and the Faebound Trilogy inspired by her Ghanaian and Sudanese heritage. She has lived in many countries, had many jobs, and owned many more cats. After a decade of working in marketing and communications, she returned to academia to complete a master’s degree in African studies alongside her writing career. El-Arifi knew she was a storyteller from the moment she told her first lie. Over the years, she has perfected her tall tales into epic ones. She currently resides in London as a full-time procrastinator.
Cursebound
They’re no longer prisoners to the fae court, but now two elven sisters are each bound by shackles of the heart—the sequel to the national bestseller Faebound, hailed as “a devastatingly romantic and breathtaking fantasy” (Tasha Suri).
United by war.
Betrayed by destiny.
Cursed by love.
Yeeran was born for war but is unprepared for love. She has left her new lover, the Queen of the fae, to return to her homeland, only to find that her former lover now threatens war against the fae.
Left behind, her sister Lettle is determined to break the curse that binds the fae to their realm. When a stranger appears in the city, Lettle is convinced he’s the key. But the Fates that once spoke to her have fallen silent.
Can Lettle and Yeeran discover the secret behind the curse—and unite these two worlds before they destroy each other?
Mrs. Kuti by Remilekun Anikulapo-Kuti
Publisher: Ouida Books
Date: January 13, 2025
Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Language: English
Where to find it: Ouida Books
Remilekun Anikulapo-Kuti
Remilekun Anikulapo-Kuti was born 12 July 1941 in London. Her early education took place in Lagos, Nigeria. Upon moving to London, she spent time at Princess Alice School and Home in Sutton Coldfield, England. On 7 January 1961, Remi married the emerging musician Olufela Ransome-Kuti who would become the celebrated Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. They had three children: Yeni, Femi and Sola (1963 – 1997). Her memoir, Mrs Kuti explores the turbulent years of her life with Fela, documenting both personal and shared struggles as they journeyed through fame. Remilekun Anikulapo-Kuti passed away on 12 January 2002 in Lagos, Nigeria. This is her first and only book.
Mrs. Kuti
This is an account of my life from the day I was born, before I met Fela, and after he entered it like a comet in 1959.” Without regret or rancour, Remilekun Anikulapo-Kuti invites us into her extraordinary life as a love interest, the wife and the estranged partner of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the Afrobeat legend. Her writing takes us from years in a home for orphaned children in the English Midlands, to London where she met the dashing Fela at a party, to moving to Nigeria where Remilekun navigates culture shock, the complexities of love, loss, and the joys of motherhood. With unabating honesty, Remilekun shares her journey, her thoughts on marriage, justice, music and Nigerian society from the 60s to the 90s.
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