Out of Africa
1937 · 399 pages
"I had a farm in Africa," Dinesen begins. Seventeen years below the Ngong Hills end in ruined coffee and a forced sale, and she tells it in prose that never asks for sympathy.
★ 6.5
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
King Leopold's Ghost
A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
1998 · 416 pages
A Liverpool shipping clerk noticed ships leaving the Congo loaded with rubber and arriving with only guns and chains. Hochschild pulls that thread into Leopold's private slave state and its millions of dead.
★ 5.8
Africa
A Biography of the Continent
1997 · 816 pages
Reader runs from the first hominids to apartheid, showing how Africa's exhausted soils and its diseases kept a vast continent thinly peopled, then how the slave trade turned people into its chief export.
★ 5.8
West with the Night
1942 · 293 pages
Raised barefoot in Kenya, Markham hunted with Nandi boys, trained racehorses, and scouted elephants from the air before flying the Atlantic alone. Hemingway said she made him ashamed as a writer.
★ 5.6
King Solomon's Mines
1885 · 320 pages
Allan Quatermain, an aging elephant hunter, follows an old map into unmapped Africa and finds a lost kingdom ruled by a tyrant. Hidden-city adventure from Tarzan to Indiana Jones runs on Haggard's machinery.
★ 5.3
Americanah
2013 · 588 pages
The defining novel of African immigration to America. Ifemelu leaves Lagos for university, discovers there that she is black, and turns the discovery into a blog that flays the country's racial pieties.
★ 5.2