Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.

Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye … I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.

How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.

She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.

In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - would never leave.

Feminist: A person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.