This weekend marks the anniversary of the death of Chinua Achebe, one of Africa's finest novelists, in 2013.
Here are ten great works by others from his continent.
The Grass is Singing
Doris Lessing
When first published in 1950, Nobel laureate Lessing's unflinchingly realistic novel created a stir. The story of a white woman's callousness towards her black farm servants in what was then Southern Rhodesia, it also showed her growing affection for a male servant later accused of murdering her.
Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih
First published in 1966 in Arabic, this is a lyrical account of a Sudanese man returning to his homeland after being educated in England. A painful portrait of cultural misunderstanding and displacement.
Wizard of the Crow
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Set in an imaginary country under the power of a despot called the Ruler, this hard-hitting novel was written in the author's native Gikuyu, and translated by himself into English. A likely candidate for the Nobel Prize, this charismatic Kenyan held the audience captive when he appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
The Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz
Inspired by the works of Sir Walter Scott, the Nobel Prizewinner's sweeping trilogy - Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street - covers the life of a family between WWI and the 1950s.
Life and Times of Michael K
J M Coetzee
Coetzee's gruelling novel about a man making a journey from Cape Town to the rural village where he was born, is set during an imaginary civil war. It won the Booker Prize, as did his equally bleak but even more brilliant later novel, Disgrace.
July's People,
Nadine Gordimer
Banned in South Africa on publication in 1981 because of its fictional depiction of the overthrow of apartheid, it shows a liberal white family forced to flee from Johannesburg to the town where their black servant lives, and the tensions this creates. It was only one of the Nobel laureate's highly political and controversial works.
The No.I Ladies Detective Agency
Alexander McCall Smith
Set in Botswana, where McCall Smith worked for several years, this comedy of manners shows the country in an affectionate but unsentimental light.
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This absorbing novel about the Nigerian Civil War in the 1960s combined political history with family saga. Adichie has become acclaimed as a voice of African fiction, so much so that Beyonce quoted a line from one of her talks in her song Flawless.
An Act of Terror
Andre Brink
Brink, who died last month, offers an intense, sometimes macho overview of South African political development in this tale of an Afrikaans man who is indoctrinated into becoming a terrorist in the name of black freedom fighters and becomes the country's most wanted criminal.
Out of Africa
Isak Dinesen
Unhappily married to an aristocrat, with whom she ran a coffee plantation in British East Africa, the Danish-born Dinesen found inspiration for her writing career in her love of Kenya - and of a big game hunter who was killed in a plane crash. She relates all of this in her classic memoir, which was filmed with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.
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