Cover Reveal: Itoro Bassey’s Ajebutter Women, Her Debut Short Story Collection (Exclusive)

Open Country Mag is exclusively revealing the African cover of Ajebutter Women by Itoro Bassey. It is her debut short story collection, forthcoming on 27 April 2027 from Paperworth Books in Nigeria and Regal House Publishing in the United States.

Here is a synopsis:

Across the United States and Nigeria, daughters come of age in the shadow of what has been given and what is expected in return. In Ajebutter Women, Itoro Bassey explores the stories, rules, and cultural myths passed down to girls about how to be “good”: obedient, respectable, and worthy of family pride. Daughterhood becomes an early lens through which these expectations take shape.

Moving between family homes, classrooms, Nigeria, and the US, Bassey’s characters navigate the cost of belonging. A friendship fractures under the weight of race, class, and what it means to be an acceptable kind of Black girl. A young woman returns to Nigeria and finds that the life she imagined for herself does not hold. Another begins to see how a childhood of privilege and careful grooming has both sheltered and estranged her.

Beneath polished lives and careful speech, these women start to question what they have been taught to carry, what they can refuse, and what it might mean to choose themselves.

Ajebutter is Yoruba slang for people born into privilege. Born and raised in the United States, Bassey spent three years living and working in Abuja. She began writing the collection after the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on her experiences as a journalist and as a woman navigating the social expectations attached to her position.

“I wanted to go behind the veneer of respectability and show the precarity that comes with ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’” she told Open Country Mag.

Her time in Nigeria also sharpened her understanding of how class shapes women’s relationships and the expectations placed on them. “People often expected that, because I’d lived abroad and spoken all this Big English, I somehow knew how to do many things I wasn’t always qualified for. This was strange, as I had lived my life as a Black woman in the US, where all I did was work and prove myself and then prove myself some more. These undeserved entitlements I received in Nigeria led me to ask many times, what impact am I having here?”

The cover designer, Christianah, told us that the artwork draws on the colour schemes of the US edition while reinterpreting them to reflect the multifaceted identities of ajebutter women.

“Rather than offering a linear impression, a singular aesthetic, or a rigid perception of womanhood,” she said, “the artwork reflects women whose self-expression is modern, dynamic and layered, influenced not just by beauty trends or comfort, but by personal evolution, radical self-acceptance, and the uninhibited joy of self-expression.”

Writers Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu and Yewande Omotoso, among others, have praised the book. Ndlovu called its prose “exquisite,” and Omotoso wrote: “Itoro Bassey’s stories leave the reader both gutted and warmed.”

Itoro Bassey is a Nigerian American writer and journalist whose work explores identity, migration, family, global Blackness, and belonging. Her writing has appeared in Brittle Paper, Catapult, Lit Hub, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, and elsewhere. A 2025 winner of the W.S. Porter Prize, she is also the author of the novel Faith (2022).

Ajebutter Women by Itoro Bassey is now available for preorder on Amazon. Open Country Mag may get an affiliate commission.

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