For our fifth annual 60 Notable Books of the Year list, we invited the literary culture critic Tolu Daniel as guest curator, to make 45 picks. He surveys “a prose landscape in search of quieter, more patient forms,” poetry “less a lyric refuge than a site of confrontation,” and “a shift towards visibility culture” where “books now circulate as events, images, and metrics long before they are encountered as texts.”

Of the eighth volume guest-edited by Sarah Lubala and Logan February, managing editor Precious Okpechi writes: “The way we express joy, the way our longings fold out of our skin, is skewed by the weight of customs.”

Politicking and ideological clashes take centre stage in Edward Berger’s papal succession drama Conclave, a frontrunner for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards. But it is in the arc of its African cardinal that the film sets a damaging narrative.

20.35 Africa Vol. VII, guest-edited by Kwame Opoku-Duku, is introduced by managing editor Precious Okpechi: “A sense of belonging permeates the poems in this anthology, an acceptance of one’s place in a flawed world.”