Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | I Do Not Come to You by Chance | 2009 | Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani | Buy |
| 2 | Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree | 2018 | Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani | Buy |
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s standalone novels offer two very different windows into Nigerian life. Her debut, I Do Not Come to You by Chance, published in 2009, is a satirical take on the “419” scam industry that won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in the Africa region. The story follows Kingsley, a struggling university graduate who drifts into his uncle’s lucrative email fraud business after failing to find honest employment.
Her second novel, Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree (2018), shifts tone dramatically. Written in collaboration with a survivor of the Boko Haram insurgency, the book follows a teenage girl whose education and future are shattered when militants attack her village. The novel was inspired by the real-life kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014. Though the two books are very different in style and subject, both reflect Nwaubani’s commitment to writing about Nigeria with clear-eyed honesty rather than sentimentality.