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Praise for Everything Good Will Come

Winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa

Finalist, Multicultural Fiction, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award—Honorable Mention

“A literary masterpiece... Everything Good Will Come put me into a spell from the first page to the very last... It portrays the complicated society and history of Nigeria through... brilliant prose.”

—World Literature Today

“Skillful … impressive debut novel…Thematically, her work is wide-ranging and yet powerfully focused, the different areas of concern drawn together so that they inform each other… Again and again Atta’s writing tugs at the heart, at the conscience. At the same time, reflecting the resilience of the Logosians whose lives she explores, humor is almost constant, effervescent, most often with a satirical slant… There are no delusions in Atta’s novel, no romanticisation or overstating of a case. Her work stands as a paean to her central character’s strengths and her determination to combat oppression.”

—The Sunday Independent (Lesotho, Africa)

Praise for News from Home

Winner of the NOMA Award for Publishing in Africa

“Atta demonstrates a fresh, vital voice in these 11 stories that move fluidly between pampered Nigerian émigrés and villagers grinding out a meager subsistence. Atta's characters are irrepressible… Atta movingly portrays these conflicted lives and gorgeously renders a wide spectrum of humanity and experience.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review and featured author interview)

“Nigerian-born Atta’s prize-winning novel, Everything Good Will Come (2006), was about a young woman’s coming-of-age in Lagos. Now Atta lives in the U. S., and this powerful collection is about the search for home… Never messagey, the wrenching contemporary stories are universal in their appeal and impact.”

—Booklist

“Sefi Atta's steady, quiet, and yet bold narrative voice is unwavering in its dedication to craft, originality, and last but not the least, truth. Truth, that is, in artistic rendition of our lives. (She) writes like one who has lived the life of each single character in her dazzling collection of short stories. The reader comes off with the sense of a story teller who is so in tune with the suffering and other life happenstances of her characters, that the reader is bound to find a commonality with them—be it cultural, psychological, social, or human.”

—Mohammed Naseehu Ali, author of The Prophet of Zongo Street

Praise for Swallow

“In Atta's spirited and large-hearted second novel (after the collection, News from Home), two young woman office workers navigate the rapids of the urban jungle of Lagos… Tolani's tale encompasses towns and villages, corruption and superstition, deceit and loyalty, all beautifully layered and building toward a wallop you never see coming.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Nigerian-born Atta, now living in the U. S., excels at telling stories of her native land, this time centering on bank clerk Tolani Ajao and Rose, her friend, roommate, and colleague at Federal Community Bank in Lagos, with interspersed accounts by Tolani’s mother, Arike, in her native village of Makoku… Atta captures the sights, sounds, and smells of her native land in the 1980s, with its War against Indiscipline in effect, as it straddles Western ways and native customs. A meandering novel with a painful punch.”

—Booklist