"This is one of the most visual books I've ever read. I just felt as if I was witnessing every scene firsthand, and my imagination was painting the most colorful pictures of North Africa, the cafés and the desert. I remember that when I read it, I was completely taken away from my life. Actually, I think this was one of the books Ethan [Hawke] gave me."

"Warning: this is one of the most upsetting books I’ve ever read, but it’s a great one. Set in South Africa, a nation struggling to remake itself in the wake of Apartheid, it tracks a professor’s downfall as he suffers a career-ending scandal followed by a horrific episode in the life of his daughter. It’s a Booker-winning book by a Nobel-winning novelist."

"This is a really obscure record released on Awesome Tapes From Africa. Ata Kak made this dance record in the early 90s that was just great. It’s so unreal. One of the things I love most about it is the percussion and the drums, they’re so repetitive. And the rapping is just great too. Dude it’s just the best. I love the Ace of Base-ness of it."

"I always read this book again just to experience the delight of my first reading. I fell madly in love with everything in that book, the two main characters, Mary and Moses, and Africa not only described but conveyed through the writing. A true writer makes a continent come to life. I met Doris Lessing once in London while I was performing, in English, a Friedrich Schiller play."

"This was the first in a series of books that feature a mouse, a vain cat, and a wombat. Everything the wombat says is nonsense (“Oh wonderful, fish—my favorite fruit.”), and it made me howl with laughter as a kid. I was brought up in East Africa, and was at school with all the international kids. We’d all been given our copies of A.A.Milne and Dr. Seuss, but people know those books. The Muddleheaded Wombat deserves a place among them."

"The narrative around contemporary Africa’s cosmopolitan cities, exciting young people, vibrant artists, and rapidly evolving promise is, happily, becoming increasingly familiar to people around the globe. In this amazing book, David Adjaye looks at architectural space across the continent, dividing it into regions defined by climates and cultures, rather than artificially-derived national boundaries. Here the Maghreb, the desert, the Sahel, the forest, the Savanna and grasslands, and the mountains and high fields, are the defining features of how different architectures throughout Africa can be witnessed."