The Famished Road, which was first published in 1991, is one of Okri’s best-known works. He earned the Booker McConnell Prize for Fiction for this novel, and in 1993 and 1998 respectively he published sequels to the work titled Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is known as one of the founding novels of African fiction in English. In this novel, Achebe considers the social realities faced by his people in the wake of colonialism. Published in 1959, Things Fall Apart is a must read for anyone interested in becoming more familiar with African fiction, specifically that which is written by Nigerian authors.

War Stories: A Memoir of Nigeria and Biafra (2002), by John Sherman, is a first-person account of the author’s time in Nigeria as a Peace Corp volunteer in 1966 and later, during the country’s civil war, as a member of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Sherman’s story provides a graphic account of the impact of the Nigerian Civil War on children.

Flora Nwapa is the first Nigerian woman to be published in Nigeria and the first black African woman to be published in England. Efuru (1966) is about a woman who, despite failure in marriage and child rearing, is an example of female independence and spiritual transcendence.

Tsitsi Dangarembga, who is from Zimbabwe (formerly part of Rhodesia), is another African writer who writes about a young main character. In Nervous Conditions (1988), Dangarembga explores the coming of age of a young woman in colonial Rhodesia during the 1960s. In the novel, Tambu faces issues surrounding gender, cultural identity, colonialism, wealth, education, and eating disorders.