Chinua Achebe,
Things Fall Apart
(Anchor/Doubleday).
Nigerian classic, presenting the traditional Igbo way of life and its disruption by the advent of the colonizers.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise
(New Press)
Another "aural archive of a lost Africa," showing a boy's journey from the Swahili Coast into the African interior with Muslim traders in the early C20.
Merle Hodge,
Crick Crack, Monkey
(Heinemann)
A girl's education in colonial Trinidad.
Jamaica Kincaid,
Annie John
(Noonday)
A girl coming of age in the Caribbean island of Antigua.
Ngugi W. Thiong'o,
A Grain of Wheat (Heinemann)
The Gikuyu struggle for independence in Kenya.
Ben Okri,
The Famished Road (Anchor/Doubleday)
For the spirit child Azaro, the reality of pre-independence Nigeria is intermingled with a world of spirits.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (Penguin)
Magical realist history of India in the 20th century, told by a boy who has magic powers because he was born at the moment of the country's independence.
Arundhati Roy,
The God of Small Things
(HarperCollins)
In the 1990s, adult twins return to the South Indian state of Kerala, where they relive the traumatic events of their childhood.
Bapsi Sidhwa,
Cracking India
(Milkweed)
The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, seen through the eyes of a young Parsi girl in the city of Lahore.