A Year in Reading: Uwem Akpan

This year, the year I finally finished my historical novel, New York, My Village, my reading has mainly revolved around African historical novels and mainly from Anglophone Africa.  I’ve read some of these books before, and others I was reading for the first time.  It was a limited tour of our diverse and precious continent; there is so much out there.  I ended up using most of these novels in my graduate writing class, to showcase how each African writer has used their unique literary styles to grapple with their history and place.  In this class we were Nigerian, American, Russian, Indian, Palestinian, and Indian. One of the Americans had lived in so many places even she isn’t sure anymore what she is!

I went back to read ’s , which I first devoured in secondary school. I didn’t only enjoy this saga anew.  The story drove me back to my 1980s understanding of Kunta Kinte’s capture and enslavement.  After reading this, I remembered being really