Before we were a press, we were readers. The books below are not a definitive list. They are the books that, between us, shaped the editorial instincts that led to Open Arts Publishing. We include them here because we believe a press should be legible — you should be able to read what we love and understand what we are trying to make.
1. Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe
The obvious choice, which does not make it the wrong one. What Achebe demonstrated — that an African novel could be the world’s novel, that its specific cultural and linguistic particularity was a strength and not a limitation — is still the argument we are making. Every independent African press is, in some sense, a continuation of what Achebe began.
2. Purple Hibiscus — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A debut novel that arrived fully formed and announced a writer who would reshape how Nigerian literature was received internationally. What interests us most about this book is the interiority of its narrator — the way Adichie makes a quiet girl’s inner life the site of everything political and familial and spiritual. That commitment to interiority, to the hidden life of a character, is something we look for in submissions.
3. The Famished Road — Ben Okri
A novel that insists on the reality of the spirit world alongside the material world, without apology and without explanation. Okri does not frame traditional Yoruba cosmology for a Western reader — he simply inhabits it. The confidence of that choice, the refusal to translate, is something we want to see more of in African literary fiction.
4. Freshwater — Akwaeke Emezi
A book that does something genuinely new: it rethinks selfhood and identity through Igbo spiritual ontology and delivers it in prose that is both lyrical and precise. Emezi is the kind of writer whose work changes what feels possible on the page. We return to this book regularly.
5. Stay With Me — Ayobami Adeyemi
A novel about marriage, loss, and the particular pressures on Nigerian women that manages to be both deeply particular and devastatingly universal. Adeyemi is a masterclass in pacing and structural control. This book is what we mean when we say we are looking for work that can compete internationally without ever trying to be anything other than African.
These are five of many. We will keep writing about the books that matter to us. If there are books you think we should know, or writers we should be reading, you can reach us at hello@openartspublishing.com.
