GARDEN HOUSE. By Eno Obong

  

 

This is the story of a (Nigerian) lady,  Mayen, charming, cosmopolitan, suave and sophisticated  - yet she is haunted by the past.  She finds love in the end, but this is not a typical "woolly" love story. This book belongs to the pantheon of outstanding imaginative works published over the decades by African women authors. The author for one writes very well and fluently, with remarkable diction. This blog is happy to reproduce just three quotations from this exquisite book here...

 "It was the worst of the slums in Lagos... roadside lined with filth; a squishy, damp-soaked, maggot ridden mass of latent putrefaction that rose in occasional heaped piles and tumbled over, spreading on all sides..."

 "(Mayen) would bear the gifts to the shrine and return with Mammywater's own gift of hymenal beads... a promise of fecundity".

 And what a tender ending to such an excellent novel! -

"She cupped his hard buttocks pressing his flesh into her flesh, parting her thighs to receive him...she felt him cleaving a path deep into her womb rocking and flowing and receding, moving with the rhythm of the sea"

 True love, and blissful consummation at last...   

A SMALL SILENCE. By Jumoke Verissimo

 

'Imprisoned for ten years for his rage against society, activist and retired academic Prof resolves to live a life of darkness after his release from prison. He holes up in his apartment, pushing away friends and family, and embraces his status as an urban legend in the neighbourhood until a knock at the door shakes his new existence. His new visitor is Desire, an orphan and final year student, who has grown up idolising Prof, following a fateful encounter in her hometown of Maroko as a child. Tentatively, the two begin to form a bond, as she returns every night at 9pm to see him. However, the darkness of the room becomes a steady torment, that threatens to drive Desire away for good. A Small Silence is an intimate and evocative debut that charges us to look again at the alienating effects of trauma and the power of solitude and darkness to ignite the imagination...'