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Jende Jonga left Cameroon to provide a better life for his wife Neni and their son. In Harlem he finds a job as a taxi driver and later as the chauffeur of senior executive of Lehman Brothers Clark Edwards. His wife and son join him in the United States. Neni even starts to work for the Edwards' too and everything seems to fall in place. Jende brings humour in the hard life of an immigrant. However, with the global collapse of economy the Jonga family’s life seems to shatter into pieces.  You start to wonder what providing a better future means and how far people go for it. Does it make sense to leave home and family and struggle in a country where you don’t have papers and rights? Neni and Jende must answer this question as individuals, as a couple and as parents.

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Chinua Achebe created a masterpiece and it's a shame how the Western world only recognizes its own classic authors. It's important to have narratives from Africa to not only focus on the colonizer’s point of view. Achebe tells the story of Okonkwo, a wealthy Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s. Okonkwo and his Igbo traditions face opposite the British political and religious forces. You may not always agree with this warrior, but the novel will make you at least understand his intentions.

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Eight stories set in Miami, Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed Caribbean country will make you fall in love with Edwidge Danticat. A woman who is not afraid to write about topics like a woman cheated by her husband and best friend, a woman having postpartum depression and a man seeing his life in slow motion while dying. Her storytelling gives you a little glimpse in the beautiful and varied Caribbean culture and how people deal with same-sex attraction, rape, adultery and HIV while trying to be part of their community and tradition.

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This book talks about various individuals and their life during Nigeria’s civil war in the 1960s. In four parts the amazing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells the story of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Some of her characters are inspired by actual persons and she listed the books she used as research at the end of her work.

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These two personal letters give an insight in the early life in Harlem of the great James Baldwin. A man ahead of his time. An intimate testament and thought-provoking confession. It’s literature which challenges the terrible legacy of racial injustice.

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I don’t know, if there is an English version of this book. I have read the German version multiple times and I am reading the original in French right now. Gabriel grows up in Burundi as the son of a Rwandese mother and French father. There is something beautiful about tragic stories written through the eyes of a child. Gabriel’s letters to his pen pal Laure are the most precious part of the book. The author Gaël Faye tried to bring back a sweet time of life before the civil war, before he had to flee from his home and start a new life in a country, he can’t call his own.

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Like many comedians, Trevor has the gift of taking his pain and creating something beautiful out of it. His story is a reminder, that there is no global “black experience”. Of course, there are many things, black people around the world have in common, but let’s not generalize any group of humans. Being black or mixed does not mean the same in South Africa, as in Switzerland, or in the United States. I fell in love with his amazing mother Patricia. However, it also scared me to read, how a strong and smart woman like her got trapped in an abusive relationship. It made me be more patient with my own flaws and realize all over again, that the only shame in an abusive relationship should be on the abuser.

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What it Means When a Man Walls From The Sky

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What it Means When a Man Walls From The Sky

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Ezinma, got shot by her sister’s abusive lover Godwin. Enebeli Okwara is raising his daughter, while is wife is studying in America and the god of ants and the goddess of rivers are feuding. These twelve short stories are each a masterpiece on its own and could not be more diverse. Short stories about different people yearning for love, acceptance, and comfort.

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This book tells the story of various people trough different times. Each chapter focuses on the next generation of the family and on one person. It all starts in Ghana hundreds of years ago and ends there again in the present. A book about tribes and families, slavery and plantations and the modern America. It makes you think about the people who were here before you and will be here after you. It makes you think about fate and generational trauma. It is a heavy but an important book.

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When I saw the title of the book I thought “not another love story”. However, this book is more than a love story between two adults. It is about the love of a parent to their (un)born child. It is the story about a marriage which breaks under the social pressure and political turbulence of 1980s Nigeria. Yejide is hoping for a miracle, for a baby. Yejide, a woman undergoing different rituals to fight infertility. Infertility, a topic which seems to lay way more often on the shoulders of the woman than the man. I don’t know, if there has ever been another book in my life, which made my heart as heavy as this one. It made me reflect on motherhood, on womanhood, on marriage and social norms. It made me wish, that sex education is available for every child in the world. Even if you start to hate the mother in-law or the husband, at the end it’s all rooted in ignorance and illiteracy.

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Inspired by a true story Washington Black is a novel about an eleven-year-old boy who works on a sugar plantation in Barbados. The owners, two English brothers are like night and day. One of them, Christopher Wilde chooses Washington as his personal servant and the boy is no longer a field slave. Their mission is to build the perfect aerial machine. It’s a book about the heartbreaking life on a plantation, an unique friendship and the search for freedom.

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Tish is nineteen and pregnant. Her love Fonny in jail and accused of rape. Their two families struggle to keep life together, each member in his own way. A story about a young love in Harlem, New York City during the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The reader will get to know Tish and Fonny and will fall in love with them. What about all the Fonnys in jail we don't know? What about all the Tishs in our own streets?

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The couple Ifemelu and Obinze leave the military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Ifemelu starts a new life in America, while Obinze chooses London. With the long distance between them they start to lose their love and each one of them struggles in the new world on its own. Years later they meet again and knowing their past I was rooting for their love even when it was against all my principles of fidelity. It made me reflect on my own view concerning loyalty. This book does not sugar coat the experience of an immigrant and is a masterpiece about race, identity, and love.

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This is a collection of short stories about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Stories from a pop star who goes back to stay with her mother or a family leaving their daughter behind to stay at grandma’s place. All in all, it is about two topics every one of us knows: Home and Love. A collection full of mash-up love, light-skinned girls, and island tales.

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Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime he never did. The book talks about a young African American couple. A couple separated by force. You may think you know what is right and wrong in a marriage but wait till this book gives you a look behind the closed doors of the American Dream.

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Ijeoma’s father gets killed during the civil war in Nigeria from 1986. Her mother leaves her to look for a better place to stay. As the reader you feel sorry for the little girl, but you also try to understand her depressed mother. Ijeoma is alone, until one day she meets another girl called Amina. It was the first Nigerian book I have read, which talked about homosexuality. It makes you think about whether sometimes it’s not easier to choose the traditional way over your own.