Guest curated by Tolu Daniel, with primary research by Orji Victor Ebubechukwu and Michael Aromolaran and editing by Otosirieze
The notable books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by African writers published in 2025, guest curated by the literary culture critic Tolu Daniel and the staff of Open Country Mag. Daniel made 45 picks and describes his process here.
Editors’ Note: Open Country Mag may earn a commission if you bought the books via the Amazon affiliate hyperlinks.
POETRY
Phases, Tramaine Suubi
Amistad | January 2025
In her debut poetry collection, the Ugandan American writer Tramaine Suubi dives into a spectrum of human emotions from anxiety to ecstasy. The book uses the phases of the moon as a structural framework and draws inspiration from the writings of Rita Dove.
African Urban Echoes, Edited by Jide Salawu & Rasaq Malik
Griot Lounge | January 15
An anthology on the complexities and nuances of life in African cities, featuring work from poets including Jumoke Verissimo, Uchechukwu Umezurike, and Tolu Oloruntoba.
The New Carthaginians, Nick Makoha
Penguin Books | February 2025
Ugandan-born poet Nick Makoha sees migration as a primary force in the construction of identity, memory, and belonging. Shortlisted for the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize, the work is inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
When We Only Have the Earth, Abdourahman A. Waberi
University of Nebraska Press | March 2025
In this three-part collection translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A. Waberi addresses the environmental perils facing the planet. The poems advocate for the recognition of daily beauty and truth as a response to ecological endangerment.
Exiled for My Mouth, Stella Nyanzi
Self-published | April 2025
Poet and activist Stella Nyanzi wrote this collection after fleeing Uganda, on account of state persecution, to document her experiences with forced migration. She examines the intersections of authoritarianism, patriarchy, and political betrayal, highlighting the emotional consequences of displacement.
Rootbound, Manthipe Moila
uHlanga Press | June 2025
After the death of an absent father, a young woman learns that leaving home does not free her from herself. Moving between South Africa and South Korea, Rootbound traces grief and memory and becoming, through language, displacement, and the quiet persistence of roots that refuse to let go. Its threading of Sesotho and Hangeul words exemplifies the fruitful risks taken by indie publisher uHlanga Press to disrupt South African poetry.
Owele, Sihle Ntuli
uHlanga Press | July 2025
South African poet Sihle Ntuli alternates between English and isiZulu to search for meaning in time, place, and identity. The poems are paired with photography by Samora Chapman.
a corpse is also a garden, Pieter Madibuseng Odendaal
uHlanga Press | August 2025
These verses move with quiet precision through inherited guilt, young love, and the everyday beauty and brutality of contemporary South Africa. Clear-eyed and self-questioning, Odendaal’s work affirms our deepest and most profound connections, both with each other and our environments.
Circumtrauma, Jumoke Verissimo
Coach House Books | September 2025
Nigerian poet Jumoke Verissimo confronts the intergenerational trauma resulting from the Nigerian Civil War. Her work integrates personal narratives with historical absences to examine the lasting psychological effects of conflict.
The Years of Blood, Adedayo Agarau
Fordham University Press | September 2025
In this debut collection, the Nigerian poet Adedayo Agarau examines his relationship with the city of Ibadan amidst kidnappings and ritual killings. Drawing from Yoruba cosmology and folklore, it won the Poetic Justice Institute Book Prize.
What God in the Kingdom of Bastards, Brian Gyamfi
University of Pittsburgh Press | September 2025
In this Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize-winning collection, Ghanaian American poet Brian Gyamfi explores grief, Blackness, and the legacy of colonial familial trauma. The narrative is presented through the perspectives of two brothers: Lot, who is alive, and Frank, a ghost after a suicide.
20.35 Africa Vol. VIII, Guest-edited by Logan February and Sarah Lubala
20.35 Africa | September 2025
The influential series’ latest anthology situates desire and the divine, inviting readers to sit with yearnings and mournings that link lives and traditions. “The craft here,” writes managing editor Precious Okpechi, “is direct and rooted in the poets’ traditional and religious backgrounds, but also deploys language that seeks, primarily, to break past the limitations of cultural heritage.”
Death Does Not End at the Sea, Gbenga Adesina
University of Nebraska Press | September 2025
A consideration of elusive citizenship and the immigrant experience, of exile and spiritual voyage. Winner of the 2024 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize, it structures its verses as an immigrant’s prayer for a new beginning.
Bloodmercy, Itiola Jones
American Poetry Review | September 2025
In her debut full-length collection, the Nigerian American poet Itiola Jones reimagines the biblical story of Cain and Abel as sisters navigating the complexities of girlhood and womanhood. The 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize-winning work explores violence, faith, queerness, intersecting personal history and Biblical myth.
Contraband Bodies, Jide Salawu
NeWest Press | October 2025
Jide Salawu documents a personal exodus, a displacement and search for a new home. The poems take on the complexities of being a Black migrant across Africa, Europe, and America dealing with loss and cultural transition.
Fenestration, Othuke Umukoro
The University Press of SHSU | October 2025
Nigerian poet Othuke Umukoro uses the history of Ghanaian slave forts and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to consider the intersections of historical and familial memory. The poems, which won the 2024 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, navigate the loss of a father, environmental perils, and the realities of living with HIV.
The Naming, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto
University of Nebraska Press | December 2025
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto examines existence as a postmodern individual and the enduring connections to one’s ancestry. The poems reimagine histories, memories, and migrations of the past, present, and future.
Winged Witnesses, Chisom Okafor
University of Nebraska Press | December 2025
Nigerian poet Chisom Okafor brings a personal feeling to the intersection of disability and chronic illness. The poems navigate physical desire and the complexities of familial relationships.
NONFICTION
Mrs Kuti, Remilekun Anikulapo-Kuti
Ouida Books | January 2025
Published posthumously, an intimate account of Mrs. Kuti’s life, of her complex, tumultuous, and deeply loving relationship with Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti, from their meeting in London in 1959 until their divorce.
Can Feminism Be African?, Minna Salami
William Collins | February 2025
This book asks what feminism looks like when rooted in African worldviews and what the continent reveals when seen through a feminist lens. Minna Salami has a bold vision of African feminist political philosophy grounded in agency, using history, theory, and personal reflection.
The World Was in Our Hands: Voices from the Boko Haram Conflict, (Editor) Chitra Nagarajan
Cassava Republic Press | April 2025
First-hand testimonies from people living through the Boko Haram conflict, from abducted girls and soldiers to community leaders and fishermen. The collection widens the frame beyond headlines, to reveal how patriarchy, poverty, climate change, and corruption shape survival in a place of unrest.
The Smallest Ones, Popina Khumanda
Penguin Books South Africa | June 2025
Popina Khumanda’s searing memoir of childhood survival after armed strangers invade her village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, forcing her and her sister into flight across borders and unimaginable loss to South Africa.
Making It Big: Lessons from a Life in Business, Femi Otedola
Narrative Landscape Press | August 2025
From one of Africa’s most influential businessmen, an account of ambition, failure, comeback, and giving back. Part memoir, part business playbook, this book traces Femi Otedola’s journey from early dreams to billionaire status, the losses that nearly broke him, and the mindset that carried him through. The bestselling book of the year in Nigeria.
Blessings and Disasters, Alexis Okeowo
Henry Holt and Co. | August 2025
Alexis Okeowo reexamines Alabama through her own upbringing as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, revealing a place far more complex than its stereotypes. With intimacy and rigor, she shows how people can love a home shaped by deep contradictions while still reckoning honestly with its violence, faith, and unfinished history.
Dancing with Jinns: Black Women Write on Taboo, Edited by Momtaza Mehri & Ellah Wakatama
Cassava Republic | September 30
In candid essays on AIDS, menstruation, mental health, and sexuality, 11 African female writers confront the impact of “taboo” across the continent.
Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, Mahmood Mamdami
Belknap Press | October 2025
A clear-eyed, personal account of how foreign interests and bad leadership shaped postcolonial Uganda under Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni. Writing as both witness and scholar, Mamdani — father of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani — shows how two very different rulers left the country broken in different ways: one by condemning the West, and the other by protecting it.
How Depression Saved My Life, Chude Jideonwo
Narrative Landscape Press | October 2025
In this deeply affecting memoir, the talk show host and Open Country Mag November 2025 cover star takes us into his personal struggles with mental health. A sobering peer into the spirit of one of Africa’s most influential voices.
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
Little Troublemaker Defends Her Name, Luvvie Ajayi
Philomel Books | May 2025
Luvvie Ajayi Jones shares a bright, tender picture book about names, courage, and self-worth. Little Troublemaker Defends Her Name follows Little Luvvie through a rough first day at a new school as she learns how to stand up for herself with kindness.
African Folktales for the Young Heart, Abubakar Yusuf Ibrahim
Iskanchi Press | July 2025
Drawn from the oral traditions of Hausaland and written for ages 8 – 12, these stories blend humor, trickster energy, and the usual moral lessons associated with African-style storytelling to open young readers to Nigerian culture.
FICTION
The Edge of Water, Olufunke Grace Bankole
Tin House Books | February 2025
A debut novel exploring Nigerian, Christian, and Yoruba cultures through three generations of women, in a family irrevocably changed by Hurricane Katrina.
The Dissenters, Youssef Rakha
Graywolf Press | February 2025
A story of one woman with many names, whose life mirrors the turbulence, desires, and betrayals of modern Egypt. After her death, her son’s attempt to understand her becomes a reckoning with history, faith, revolution, and the fragile hope of real change.
Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf | March 2025
Centering the experiences of four women during the pandemic — Nigerians Chiamaka, Zikora, and Omelogor, and Guinean Kadiatou — Dream Count crosses continents, romance, academia, and the societal pressures of womanhood. It is the first novel by Adichie — Open Country Mag‘s September 2021 cover star — in over a decade and, in global publishing, the most anticipated book of the year.
Theft, Abdulrazak Gurnah
Riverhead Books | March 2025
Gurnah’s first book since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021, Theft follows three Tanzanians across three decades, moving between Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, his birthplace. Kazim, Badar and Fauzia are haunted by childhood trauma, wrestling with belonging, betrayal, and postcolonial transformation.
The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura, Tierno Monénembo
Schaffner Press | March 2025
Living in exile under an assumed name, the titular character relates her story to an older woman, her checkered past, her patricide and former life of crime and prostitution. The novel, which was reviewed in this publication, is set in French Guinea and Paris, and was translated from French to English by Ryan Chamberlain.
The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami
Pantheon Books | March 2025
In the dystopian near-future this novel is set, a Moroccan American woman finds herself detained by a government agency in the California desert, after an algorithm determines her propensity for crime. Departing from the realism of her first three novels, Lalami enters the terrain of science fiction, of dream mining-brain implants and state surveillance.
Promises, Goretti Kyomuhendo
Catalyst Press | March 2025
A couple’s bond is threatened when one of them migrates illegally from Uganda to the United Kingdom, desperate to escape economic hardship. Longing and doubt brew in the distance between them, as the couple learn to live by themselves, amounting to a moving consideration of the tension between love and personal ambition.
The Watkins Book of African Folklore, Helen Nde
Watkins Publishing | March 2025
From creation myths and animal fables to stories of love, trickery, and power, these vividly retold tales trace the continent’s vast cultural and geographic range while offering rich historical context.
How to Get Rid of Ants, Jesutomisin Ipinmoye
Parrésia Publishers | April 2025
These stories of mundane struggles against social pressure and ambition become surreal or existential crises. As some characters pursue shortcuts to success and magical solutions for marriage, others navigate physical and domestic disruptions that defy logic.
The Creation of Half-Broken People, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
House of Anansi Press/Anansi International | April 2025
A gothic novel: a nameless woman is plagued by visions, inherited intergenerational trauma, within the eerie confines of a colonial museum. The novel, which won the Best International Fiction prize at the 44th Sharjah International Book Fair, examines the collusion of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism in normalizing specific forms of womanhood.
Everything Is Fine Here, Iryn Tushabe
House of Anansi Press | April 2025
Set in Uganda, where there are strict anti-homosexuality laws, 18-year old Aine befriends her older sister’s lesbian partner. Tensions rise when their Christian mother issues an ultimatum, and Aine, unable to change her mind, runs away.
Bitter Honey, Lola Akinmade Åkerström
Bloomsbury Publishing | May 2025
Nigerian-Swedish author Lola Akinmade Åkerström sweeps through four decades and three continents to follow Black women navigating love and selfhood. The narrative incorporates the political unrest of late 20th-century Gambia.
Salutation Road, Salma Ibrahim
Mantle | June 2025
Salma Ibrahim offers, in Salutation Road, a haunting, time-slipping debut about belonging and the lives we almost lived. The novel follows Sirad Ali, a young woman drifting through South London, who is suddenly thrust into an alternate Mogadishu and forced to confront a mirror version of herself.
Lagos Will Be Hard for You, Ayotola Teghingbola
Masobe Books | June 2025
Short stories at the crossroads of Nigerian life and the Western world, featuring desperate struggles against injustice and societal pressures. The characters face their own ambitions, traditions, mental health, and needs to survival.
The Tiny Things Are Heavier, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo
Bloomsbury Publication | June 2025
In this debut novel straddling Lagos and the American Midwest, a Nigerian immigrant woman works to adjust to her new life, juggling the demands of graduate school alongside a romantic quandary and a fractured relationship with her brother.
Lonely Crowds, Stephanie Wambugu
Little, Brown and Company | July 2025
Narrated by Ruth, who, like Wambugu, is Kenyan, this debut, coming-of-age novel, which has been compared to works by Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid and Elena Ferrante, traces the arc of a friendship between two queer girls in New York in the ‘90s, a cultural hub alive with drugs, alcohol and sexual experimentation.
Curandera, Irenosen Okojie
Soft Skull | July 2025
In her 2025 Ondaatje Prize-longlisted second novel, Nigerian British author Irenosen Okojie utilizes magical realism to trace rebirth and redemption between seventeenth-century Cape Verde and contemporary London.
Beneath the Scar, Bento Baloi
Editora Trinta Zero Nove | July 2025
Bernardo is torn from his home and branded “unproductive,” shipped off to a brutal reeducation camp in post-independence Mozambique, leaving the woman he loves behind, pregnant. A story of love and survival, of the wounds of history and the stubborn human will to remain whole.
This Kind of Trouble, Tochi Eze
Tiny Reparations Books | August 2025
In 1960s Lagos, lovers Margaret and Benjamin are torn apart by their shared pasts. Decades later, they must reunite for the sake of their grandson, who starts to show signs of the same struggles that once plagued Margaret.
Indigene, Sefi Atta
Interlink Books | August 2025
Consisting of the title novella and short stories, the collection follows four professional Nigerian women navigating social, economic, and cultural pressures in various cities.
Shamiso, Brian Chikwava
Canongate Books | August 2025
In this second novel by Zimbabwe’s Brian Chikwava, a young woman named Shamiso comes of age while dealing with cultural and personal issues. A story of gender, as the protagonist defines herself as female while fundamentally existing as “they.”
The Nga’phandileh Whisperer: A Sauútiverse Novella, Eugen Bacon
Stars and Sabers Publishing | September 2025
A bold, genre-bending sci-fi fantasy book, The Nga’phandileh Whisperer follows Chant’L, a gifted young Guardian punished for misusing her sound magic and exiled to a brutal sound-island far from home. Stripped of her status but not her power, she discovers that magic is inborn — and dangerous when driven by rage.
Cursed Daughters, Oyinkan Braithwaite
Atlantic Books | September 2025
Three generations of women in the Falodun family navigate a perceived household curse. Their story is told in a non-linear structure, itself framed as a metaphor for the cyclical nature of generational trauma.
I Cry at the Feet of My Other Body, Mustapha Enesi
Witsprouts Books | September 2025
Across his thirteen short stories, Enesi centres women, exploring the relationships between agency and femininity.
Dealing with the Dead, Alain Mabanckou
The New Press | September 2025
A young man who wakes up in a cemetery and realises that he is dead, buried at twenty-two, stuck forever in purple flared trousers, surrounded by other restless voices who also have stories to tell. As Liwa returns home one last time to see the grandmother he loves and piece together the night he died, the afterlife becomes a sharp and unsettling reckoning with Congolese history, memory, corruption, and the lives a broken system cuts short.
A Meal Is a Meal, Nnamdi Anyadu
Narrative Landscape Press | October 2025
Twelve stories by Nigerian author Nnamdi Anyadu blend regional myths and culinary culture with gothic elements, cannibalism, and sabotage. Its dark symbolism explores the human condition and the intersections of traditional beliefs with the macabre.
Back Home Abroad and Other Stories, Pede Hollist
Narrative Landscape Press | October 2025
These fifteen stories by the Sierra Leonean author detail the lives of individuals crossing continents, and how migration reshapes cultural identities and personal histories. Stories that confront racism, patriarchy, and memory.
Secrets of the First School, T.L. Huchu
Pan Macmillan | October 2025
The fifth and concluding fantasy novel in Huchu’s Edinburgh Nights series, it uses Ropa Moyo’s banishment to the Other Place to explore power, legacy, and the cost of exclusion within magical and social hierarchies. Set in Edinburgh but shaped by the author’s Zimbabwean perspective, the novel weaves questions of inheritance, education, and historical influence into a story about resisting domination and reclaiming agency in the face of entrenched authority.
Borderline Fiction, Derek Owusu
Canongate Books | November 2025
A moving portrait of mental health struggles, loneliness, and identity, through the story of Marcus, a London-born man of Ghanaian descent addicted to drugs and alcohol and is often in a dissociative state.
Abibiman Publishing | December 2025
Beneath the buzz of Lagos is a world whose existence is all too glorifying to escape cursory attention – the fast and thriving subculture of internet scams. Okeh — profiled in this magazine — tells the story of a romance scammer and what he makes of his world.
Three Stories of Forgetting, Djaimilia Pereir de Almeida, Translated by Alison Entrekin
FSG Originals | December 2025
Celestino is an old slave trader. Boa Morte de Silva is a valet in Lisbon, writing to his daughter endlessly for her forgiveness. Bruma, an enslaved man, introduces Eça de Queirós into the world of literature. Interconnected tales of three men that explore themes of memory, colonialism, and the legacies of slavery. ♦
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More Lists and Series from Open Country Mag
— The Notable Books of the Year: 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021
— Our Top Stories of the Year: 2025, 2024, 2023
— The Rovingheights x Open Country Mag Bestseller List: 2024, 2023, 2022