Dream Count

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.”

Her second novel, the monumental Half of a Yellow Sun, was a major step in her singular cultural exceptionality. Fifteen years on, in Open Country Mag’s first sit-down interview, the great writer and careful thinker looks back, reckoning with her private losses and public evolution.