Nigerian author Lola Ogunyemi’s book listed among New Yorker’s best of 2022

‘Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions’, a book by Lola Ogunyemi, the Nigerian author, has been named in the New Yorker’s best of 2022 list.

New Yorker is a magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry.

‘Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions’, published in 2022, is a book composed of interlocking short stories.

It follows the lives of four Nigerian women who meet at a boarding school in the nineteen-eighties and whose futures are drastically altered by a protest that they organize.

In the New Yorker’s list, the magazine named titles adjudged by its editors as being among the year’s most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads.

Speaking on Ogunyemi’s book, the magazine said: “The stories move backward and forward in time. We excavate nineteenth-century family roots and leap to 2050 when one character sacrifices herself for her son.

“Through the years, the four friends face various challenges. One encounters racism in Kraków; another, unhappy as a banker in New York, contemplates the “scalp-searing sun” and the bean pudding of home.

“Ogunyemi shows how early friendships can shape entangled alliances that define women’s lives.”

Among those who lauded the author for her work is Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the DG of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), who tweeted: “The whole family is so proud that your book made the New Yorker’s best of 2022 list!”