Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| I Do Not Come to You by Chance | 2009 | Buy |
| Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree | 2018 | Buy |
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is a Nigerian author and journalist based in Abuja. Her debut novel, I Do Not Come to You by Chance (2009), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Africa region) and drew wide attention for its darkly comic look at Nigeria’s “419” email scam industry. The novel follows a young engineering graduate who, unable to find legitimate work, gets pulled into his uncle’s fraud operation. Nwaubani wrote the book partly to explore how educated, otherwise decent people end up in criminal enterprises when the economy offers them few alternatives.
Her second novel, Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree (2018), takes on a very different subject. Co-written with a survivor, it tells the fictionalized story of a teenage girl abducted by Boko Haram militants in northeastern Nigeria. The book was inspired by the 2014 kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok, which became an international news story under the #BringBackOurGirls campaign. In addition to her fiction, Nwaubani works as a journalist and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the BBC. She is also the author of a non-fiction account of her great-grandfather, a slave trader in pre-colonial Nigeria, which appeared in The New Yorker in 2018.