Novelist Chinua Achebe, hailed as the father of African literature, when speaking once of the medium’s complicity in colonialism said: “Literature is not a luxury for us. It is a life and death affair because we are fashioning a new man.”
Luxury or not, generations of writers have long explored the brutal consequences of colonialism past and present. While Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth make for informative nonfiction reads, here is a list of some of the best novels exploring the experiences of history, identity and exile.
