Showing titles in African

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), 1st Viscount St Albans, Attorney General and then Lord Chancellor of England, was an immensely learned, clever and ambitious man, with considerable political influence during the later years of Queen Elizabeth I and through almost two decades of the reign of her...

The 12 Lays of Marie de France offer one of the most striking collections of short narrative poems of the 12th century - two centuries before Chaucer. Written in Anglo-French, they contain beguiling and entertaining stories of love and romance, of chivalry and adventure with sometimes even a...

Best known for his glorious comic novels, Charles Portis was also a prolific essayist, travel writer, and newspaper reporter. Now, for the first time, these writings—journalism, short fiction, memoir, travel stories, and even a play—have been brought together in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. The collection encompasses the breadth of Portis’s fifty-year writing career, covering topics as varied as road tripping in Baja, Elvis’s visits to his aging mother, and his own boyhood in Arkansas.

When her husband dies, aging Miss Helen begins to fill her home in the remote South African bush with strange sculptures made from beer cans and old headlights. A local clergyman and a young woman visitor try to decide whether Miss Helen's peculiar art is an outpouring of creativity or an outbreak of madness.

The remarkable story of the Langbourne brothers is picked up in 1893. Morris, just 17, makes the bold and risky decision to head north, deeper into Africa. Morris and his younger brother, David, thus embark on a new adventure - to set up business as traders. After walking through the African bush for three months with six wagons laden with goods and hardly a track to guide them, Morris and David stop in the settlement of KoBulawayo and build their first warehouse out of wooden poles and mud.

Beginning in the coastal town of Lowestoft and concluding in the sacred village of Iken—long regarded as a place of Christian pilgrimage—this lyrical audiobook traces a meaningful path through Suffolk's landscapes, heritage, and spiritual legacy. Each poem serves as a step along the journey, blending nature writing, historical reflection, and spiritual contemplation into a deeply immersive listening experience. Through evocative language and vivid imagery, Kevin Algar captures the essence of Suffolk's countryside, its timeless beauty, and its deep-rooted connection to faith and history.

This succinct account the life of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott focuses on his development as poet, playwright, and man of the theater: director, producer, teacher. Friends and colleagues who figured in his career are recalled. The importance of his native St Lucia and family influences in the shaping of his creativity and his view of the world are highlighted, as these evolved in synergy with his receptivity to the poetry and theater of the wider world.

I want you to know that I see you. I want you to know that even if no one else does, even if you are a ghost in this bookshop, or just the static floating across the screen of your computer, wherever you’re reading this, I see you. I see you in the dark and I see you in the grey. I see you as a story, as words I have spoken or may yet speak. Maybe only in a memory or a dream. I see your hands and your arms and your body and your legs and your face and I see what you have been and what you will be.

L’inventaire des rêves, c’est avant tout la naissance de quatre grandes héroïnes, quatre femmes puissantes venues d’Afrique de l’Ouest dont les destins et les rêves se croisent. Chiamaka est une rebelle qui a déçu sa famille huppée du Nigeria, car au mariage avec enfants elle préfère vivre de sa plume, sans attaches.

Shining a light on the remarkable, untold stories of reconciliation in Rwanda since the genocide in 1994, Kill the Devil is a love story between a survivor and a perpetrator of genocide in a lesson for our times and for all time.

A new century, and a time of celebration, for family, marriages and children, and a necessity to expand the business. It is also a time for sadness, suffering and loss; Mother Africa does not change her rules for anyone. When all is against the Langbourne brothers, a higher loyalty must prevail.

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives.

Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa has long been regarded as a classic of African travel literature. In fulfilling his mission to find the Niger River and in documenting its potential as an inland waterway for trade, Park was significant in opening Africa to European economic interests. His modest, low-key heroism made it possible for the British public to imagine themselves as a welcomed force in Africa. As a tale of adventure and survival, it has inspired the imaginations of audiences since its first publication in 1799 and writers from Wordsworth and Melville to Conrad.

Nominally intended as an aid to his son and heir, Ptahhotep's writings offer a fascinating glimpse into the concerns of the period, from manners, customs, and lofty concerns like virtue, to the everyday and mundane concerns of navigating relationships.

Bought to you by Penguin. Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience from the award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire, celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé's Lemonade and Black Is King. With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the...

This is a minute-by-minute depiction of a typical night at a legendary monthly house party known as 'The Wickedest'. Here, we meet a vivid cast of characters, young and old, all surfing a revelry steeped in camaraderie, community, desire and a spirit of jubilant defiance. A modern epic, The Wickedest explores the institution of shoobs or house parties and their vital role within working-class communities. The poems range from classical English sonnets to experimental forms and are immersively interwoven with text messages and ephemera. 

A compelling anthology of Black voices from England, America, Africa and the Caribbean, from people who lived, worked, campaigned and travelled in Britain from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library. Professor Hakim Adi, shortlisted for the...

Named after the first man at the creation of the world in Malagasy mythology, Ietsy Razak was raised to perpetuate the glory of his namesake and expected to be as illuminated as his Great Ancestor. But in the chaos of modernity, his young life is marked only by restlessness, maddening insomnia, and an adolescent apathy.

Prufrock and Other Observations is the title of a pamphlet of 12 poems by T.S. Eliot published in 1917 by The Egoist, a small publishing firm run by Dora Marsden, an English suffragette and philosopher of language. Most of the poems had been published earlier in literary magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which was Eliot's first published poem and appeared in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Modern Verse at the urging of Ezra Pound, overseas editor for the magazine.

In this never-before-published collection, poet Upile Chisala grapples with themes of love, loss, and desire. Throughout this third book, she explores her identity as a black Malawian woman, offering intimate reflections on her life and experiences, imparting a stirring, universal message of empowerment and self-love.