- Coming #BackWithABang in 2021
April 2021
- Book Club Event
- Fiction
- In partnership
- Online
Essex Book Festival (UK) in partnership with Roving Heights Book Club (Nigeria) presents Ukamaka Olisakwe
A modern feminist classic in the making from a rising star of the Nigerian literature scene
Ogadinma or, Everything Will be All Right tells the story of the naive and trusting Ogadinma as she battles against Nigeria's societal expectations in the 1980s.
After a rape and unwanted pregnancy leave her exiled from her family in Kano, thwarting her plans to go to university, she is sent to her aunt's in Lagos and pressured into a marriage with an older man.
As their whirlwind romance descends into abuse and indignity, Ogadinma is forced to channel her independence and resourcefulness to escape a fate which appears all but inevitable.
Ogadinma, the UK debut by Ukamaka Olisakwe, introduces a heroine for whom it is impossible not to root, and announces the author as a gifted chronicler of the patriarchal experience.
Publisher: The Indigo Press
ISBN: 9781911648161
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May 2021
- Book Club Event
- Digital
- Non-fiction
Essex Book Festival and the African and Caribbean Books and Writers Group present a digital book club with Toby Green – A Fistful of Shells
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution. Described a s a book "that shakes history", Winner of the Historical Writers Association Non-Fiction Crown, the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History and the Nayef Al-Rohdan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding amongst many many other accolades. Toby Green, historian joins the Essex Book Festival and African and Caribbean Book and Writers Group digital book club to discuss, share his outstanding book.… Read more