Sardines, by Nuruddin Farah (used)

Winner of the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Nuruddin Farah is often praised as Africa's greatest contemporary novelist. The trilogy Variations on the Theme on an African Dictatorship, in particular, has earned him enormous critical acclaim and is considered "the centerpiece of Farah's achievement" by the Guardian.

In Sardines, the second novel of the trilogy, a woman loses her job as editor of the national newspaper and finds her efforts to instill her daughter with a sense of dignity and independence threatened by an oppressive government and the traditions of conservative Islam. This book brilliantly combines a social commentary on life under a dictatorship with a compassionate exploration of African feminist issues.