Land of Many Colors is set in the fictional city of Fort Pilote in the French Caribbean. It opens with the deaths of a young liberation activist and his mother in 1984. The narrator, a doctor who handles both of these cases, attempts to reconstruct the history of the family through four generations. The doctor's account illuminates the political and social complexities of race and class distinctions, the legacy of French colonialism that has spawned the movement for independence. Set in Jamaica, Nanna-ya explores the relationships that develop between George, a well-to-do store-owner, his...

The book starts with the premise that Africa's economic renewal will require moving beyond the narrow bounds of structural adjustment reform and promoting the greater effectiveness of the region's public institutions. Economic reform will not be successful unless the central states in the region develop more productive relationships with the other institutions that inevitably condition economic relations and the context in which development takes place. This institutional debate is particularly important because the recent democratization of African public life has resulted in a rapidly...

In a literary reversal as deadly serious as it is wickedly satiric, this novel by the acclaimed French-speaking African writer Abdourahman A. Waberi turns the fortunes of the world upside down. On this reimagined globe a stream of sorry humanity flows from the West, from the slums of America and the squalor of Europe, to escape poverty and desperation in the prosperous United States of Africa. It is in this world that an African doctor on a humanitarian mission to Franceadopts a child. Now a young artist, this girl, Malaika, travels to the troubled land of her birth in hope of finding her...

T., an acclaimed but ageing actor, and Efina, a passionate theatergoer, are engaged in an obsessive love affair that careens from attraction to repulsion. They compulsively write lettersoften to express their intense dislike of one anotherwhich are sent or unsent, answered or unanswered. They meet, they break up, they marry, and they get divorced. They neither can live with nor without one another, and this impossible state of affairs lasts all their lives. In-between, there are other men and many other women, but throughout, the magic of the theater and the art of make-believe endure....

We Are the Birds of the Coming Stormis a wild novel that oscillates between fiction and reality. The story centers on two young women: Voltairine, a dancer who no longer dances but whose body is still haunted by the movement of dance, and her soulmate Emile, a young woman recovering from unexpected cardiac arrest. The girls are inseparable, and both their lives have been shattered by the horrors of rape. The opening of the dreamlike novel sets a bleak stage as Voltairine watches Emile lying in a hospital bed, her temperature dropping to dangerous levels. Voltairine is filled with...