100 books like Dominion

This type of book taught me much about my own country, Zambia. It starts with the story of David Livingstone’s “discovery” of Victoria Falls, and many characters, including a choir of mosquitos, took me for a wild ride through colonial history, the struggle for independence, modern-day Zambia, and then into the future.

I had learned about some of the historical events in school, but many were revelations unearthed by Serpell’s meticulous research. I found the characters riveting, and the storytelling complex, creative, and exciting. Reading this incredible book has also made me richer in my knowledge of my home country. 

This first book in the Nameless Republic trilogy comes after Okungbowa’s award-winning novel, David Mogo Godhunter, where gods cast a new Lagos into chaos. Son of the Storm offers a powerful voice to women, featuring a prominent female cast in politics, greed, and revenge. Herein is a world strewn with betrayal and superstition. The story ends on a cliff, paving way for the second book in the trilogy by Orbit.  

Cyberfunk! Anthology extends a new conversation in black speculative fiction by offering cyberpunk with an Afrocentric flavour. Taking stories from Africa and the diaspora, this anthology integrates light and darkness, social justice, and inclusion in black hero/ines as you’ve never seen them before. Each story invites openness and expands the interpretation of black writing and the rising power of the black voice. Featuring stories from Hannibal Tabu, John Jennings, Balogun Ojetade, and edited by a keen-sighted pioneer author, editor, and publisher Milton J. Davis. Find out how to play the odds in a twisted world.   

This Nommo-award-winning collection is experiential in its offerings of literary fragments yet bold and playful—a clean taste of Wole Talabi’s creativity and curiosity on genre and reimagining a future Africa. Talabi is unlike your typical short story writer, if there’s ever one. His stories are sharp, brisk, hauling the reader to mindful captivation. The collection is a transcultural odyssey into Yoruba mythology in stories of logic, illogic, the known and unknown, relationship and fallout, trust and betrayal, transposition, exposition, and much escapade. Virtual reality has a role here, as do gods and goddesses, victors, and survivors. Incomplete Solutions is a cross-genre degustation of possibilities and impossibilities that deconstruct the reader’s mindset. 

This book fills a gap that I didn’t know was missing until I read it.

Not much has been written documenting the history of Black Africans in 20th/21st Century London, but Jimi Famurewa covers the migration, the cultural contributions, the food, the music, the community…ah, it really covers a lot.

Non-fiction is never really my go-to but is immensely readable and the research is thorough and sharp. It filled in some the gaps in the word-of-mouth anecdotes you hear from the older generation, as well as introduced me to corners of our history that I wasn’t as familiar with.

This edited volume studies Black festive traditions in the Americas that are rooted in African interpretations of early-modern Iberian customs. It shows how, from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved and free Africans in the Americas used Catholic brotherhoods as spaces for cultural and religious expression, social organization, and mutual aid. By demonstrating that the syncretic development of certain Black performance traditions in the Americas is a phenomenon that already set in on African soil, it breaks with previous scholarship that (mis)interpreted these festive traditions in the Americas as new, Creole syncretisms. I am convinced that this pioneering book will strongly affect the way future generations of scholars will come to understand Black cultural and religious identity formation in the Americas.

A memoir by a young biracial woman who travels to Israel, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the U.S. South, searching for her own identity. 

The pleasure in the memoir comes from her journey. She is a good storyteller and takes us inside her often uncomfortable encounters with folks she has romanticized as being the “real” Black folks. Raboteau discovers, after searching for ten years all over the world, that rather like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, her true home lies within. 

One of the things I loved about the book was her well-told conversations and visits with people in countries I knew little about. The book was the winner of American Book Award.

Omenana to Infinity is an anthology of collected works formerly published in Omenana Magazine. The anthology is edited by Mazi Nwonwu and Chinelo Onwualu, like the magazine its stories are culled from. The duo also founded and edited the magazine which is the first African, exclusively speculative fiction magazine. It's important to me because it contains some of the earliest works of speculative short fiction by African writers I would read as an issue of a magazine and did a great lot in platforming speculative fiction writers on the continent. 

In these times of Black Lives Matter, emboldened white-supremicists, and with European dominance descendant, Born into Blackness is a revelatory and blunt dose of historical reality. I was not fully aware of the centrality of the slave economy in Europe’s rise to global dominance. Most importantly, I was ignorant of the level of cultural, political, and economic sophistication of the African nations when the Portuguese first explored the west coast of Africa. I had some understanding of the Haitian revolution and its manifestation of the enlightenment ideals, but this book opened my eyes to the historical ripples of the revolution: the Louisiana purchase, ceding much of present-day Southern US from Napoleon’s France; the sale and forced-march of thousands of slaves into the cotton-growing south, fueling an economic take-off that made the US an imperial power.

It's the first of its kind, the first installment in a line of Year's Best African Speculative Fiction anthologies meant to spotlight the works of African writers and writers of African descent. Year's Best anthologies have been a genre thing for over 5 decades. This is an important installment in the development of African speculative short fiction. It was published by the editor as well in a small press he founded, Jembefola Press. The anthology made him the first African editor to be a Hugo award best editor finalist and a Locus award best editor and best anthology finalist.