Walking on Cowrie Shells, Nana Nkweti
Walking on Cowrie Shells, Nana Nkweti
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Walking on Cowrie Shells
Stories

Author: Nana Nkweti

Narrator: Zoleka Vundla

Unabridged: 6 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/25/2022

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories


Synopsis

In her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti's virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story "It Takes a Village, Some Say," Nkweti skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. In "The Devil Is a Liar," a pregnant pastor's wife struggles with the collision of western Christianity and her mother's traditional Cameroonian belief system as she worries about her unborn child.

In other stories, Nkweti vaults past realism, upending genre expectations in a satirical romp about a jaded PR professional trying to spin a zombie outbreak in West Africa, and in a mermaid tale about a Mami Wata who forgoes her power by remaining faithful to a fisherman she loves. In between these two ends of the spectrum there's everything from an aspiring graphic novelist at a comic con to a murder investigation driven by statistics to a story organized by the changing hairstyles of the main character.

A dazzling, inventive debut, Walking on Cowrie Shells announces the arrival of a superlative new voice.

About Nana Nkweti

Nana Nkweti is a Caine Prize finalist and alumna of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has garnered fellowships from MacDowell, Kimbilio, Ucross, and the Wurlitzer Foundation, among others. She is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Blair on May 05, 2022

What an incredibly vibrant and imaginative collection! Walking on Cowrie Shells is a document of the Cameroonian-American experience in ten irresistibly spirited stories, a passport to another culture and, sometimes, other worlds. Nana Nkweti writes with the imagination of a Sayaka Murata or Irenose......more

Goodreads review by BookOfCinz on April 16, 2023

Love me a collection of short stories, and one with a great title... however this one fell a little flat for me. While I love how diverse the stories are, I only loved the one where the woman was trying to get pregnant. Honestly, Ill read what she writes next.......more

Goodreads review by Heather on June 07, 2021

This is a stunning, wide-ranging collection, and I was blown away by its scope. For me, the first story ("It Takes a Village Some Say") remained the most memorable with its multiple narrators (the latter of which emphatically corrects and replaces the former). I also appreciated the use of sporadic......more

Goodreads review by Karen on September 06, 2021

Each story was vastly different in this debut short story collection so it’s not surprising that some resonated and others didn’t. I especially liked the story about selkies (a type of mermaid) and the story about a Cameroonian American woman unburdening herself from a controlling Afrocentric akata......more

Goodreads review by 2TReads on September 03, 2021

These stories were fiyah. -This is what we will tell you. The only truth you'll ever know. And you'll accept it because you once set out cookies for Santa, you trust deeply in the power of your voice and your vote, and expect that when you die, when you are nothing but bone and bliss, there lies a ne......more