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Changes: A Love Story
Ama Ata Aidoo
Novel, 1991
Follows an educated professional woman in 1980s Accra as she navigates marriage, polygamy and modern urban expectations.
Books set in Ghana
Eight books by writers from Ghana, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Changes: A Love Story and Our Sister Killjoy.
About the literature of Ghana
Ghana's literature is shaped by Ama Ata Aidoo and Ayi Kwei Armah, who wrote about colonialism, independence and what came after. Much Ghanaian fiction and drama is written in English, but oral storytelling in Fante, one of the Akan languages, runs through Aidoo's play Anowa, set in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. Both writers published major early work in the 1960s, in the first years after independence in 1957.
Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born shows a railway clerk refusing corruption in Accra in the last years of Nkrumah's rule. Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story is set in 1980s Accra, where an educated professional woman weighs marriage and polygamy. Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing traces two branches of a family from eighteenth-century Fante and Asante lands through the Cape Coast slave castle.
By writers from Ghana
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Our Sister Killjoy
Ama Ata Aidoo
Novel, 1977
A young Ghanaian woman's journey to Europe and back frames a sharp postcolonial critique, anchored in Ghanaian identity and the legacy of colonialism.
Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi
Novel, 2016
Traces two branches of a family from 18th-century Fante and Asante lands through slavery, the Cape Coast slave castle and later Gold Coast and Ghanaian history.
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Ayi Kwei Armah
Novel, 1968
A railway clerk resists corruption in Accra in the last years of Nkrumah's rule, capturing the disillusion of post-independence Ghana.
Anowa
Ama Ata Aidoo
Drama, 1970
A play rooted in Fante oral tradition, set in the 19th-century Gold Coast, about a headstrong woman, marriage and the slave trade.
The Dilemma of a Ghost
Ama Ata Aidoo
Drama, 1965
A play about a Ghanaian man who returns from America with an African American wife, clashing with his extended family in a Gold Coast town.
Two Thousand Seasons
Ayi Kwei Armah
Novel, 1973
An epic, communal narrative of a thousand years of African resistance to Arab and European domination, rooted in the West African savannah and coast.
Fragments
Ayi Kwei Armah
Novel, 1970
Follows a young man returned from America to Accra, crushed by family pressure and the materialism of newly independent Ghana.
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