Even More New Releases for 2015

So far 2015 has seen new releases from Okey Ndibe, Amir Tag Elsir and Jacques Strauss, and we still have works from Sarah Lotz, Ivan Vladislavić, Mia Couto and more to come. Well, the new releases just keep on coming!!!! 

Awaiting Cover Image

Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
July 2015

Published by Vintage and described as a 'brilliant Kafka-esque satire', Blackass is a funny, fierce, inventive and daringly provocative. 

White skin, green eyes, red hair - black ass. Furo Wariboko - born and bred in Lagos - wakes up on the morning of his job interview to discover he has turned into a white man. As he hits the street of Lagos running, Furo finds the dead ends of his life open out wondrously before him. The world, it seems, is his oyster - except for one thing: despite his radical transformation, his ass remains robustly black ...

Making Wolf by Tade Thompson
September 2015

Published by Rosamrium Publishing, Making Wolf is a gritty thriller set in modern-day West Africa. Weston Kogi, a security guard in a supermarket in London , returns to his home in West Africa for his aunt's funeral. After catching up with his family, his ex-girlfriend Nana, and an old schoolmate over good food and plenty of beer, it seems like a bit of harmless hyperbole to tell people he works as a homicide detective. But when he is kidnapped by separate rebel factions to investigate the murder of a local hero, Papa Busi, Weston soon finds out that solving the crime may tip the country into civil war. A noir novel set in the blazing sunlight of the tropics, Making Wolf is an outrageous, frightening, violent, and sometimes surreal homecoming experience of a lifetime. 

There's also Elnathan John's novel A Star is Born, about the life of an Almajiri (the name often given to young children in Northern Nigeria who are qu'ranic students, but also sometimes beg for alms and food at times when not in school). 

It will be published by Cassava Republic later this year, with Jeremy Weate (of Cassava Republic) saying: " ... it's a human story of the pressures and difficulties of growing up in Northern Nigeria. This is the story of a child who grows up , a street child whom nobody knows. He joins a gang, his mother is ill and his brother have become Shia."

Not sure when it will be published, but Yewande Omotoso's second novel, The Woman Next Door, published by Chatto & Windus is also one to look out for. It's said to be a "surprising and endearing story of two women living in Cape Town". Here's a synopsis: 

Hortensia James and Marion Agostino are neighbours and sworn enemies. They share hedge and hatred and prune both with a zeal and vim that belies the fact that they are both over eighty. Marion, troubled by her inertia in the face of apartheid, nevertheless resents the intrusion of a black woman into her white neighbourhood. Hortensia, weary of the hypocrisies of South Africa and blind to her own, has no capacity for social graces or friendship.
But one day an unforeseen event forces the women together. Gradually the sniping and bickering softens into lively debate and memories shared and, finally, just possibly, into something that looks a bit like a (rather spiky) form of friendship.