The top 10 books about Nigeria.

Author Barnaby Phillips chooses fiction and non-fiction that shows an often caricatured nation in all its rich variety

Complexity and variety … a man walks on a pedestrian bridge overlooking traffic in Lagos. Photograph: Akintunde Akinleye/Reuter

Nigeria has a terrible image – as a land of email scammers, obscene corruption and religious bigotry and violence – but the stereotypes only tell part of a more complex, and often more attractive, truth. When I was based in Nigeria as a BBC correspondent, I learnt that the country I was covering had all the complexity and variety of an entire continent.
From the oil-polluted swamps of the Niger Delta in the south, to the sharia-governed Muslim states in the arid north, Nigeria's regions and many ethnicities often have little in common. Of course this diversity is one of Nigeria's intrinsic problems but it is also what makes it such a stimulating place. Nigeria is a land of rich cultures, stunning artistic achievement and industrious and resourceful people.
I hope my book, Another Man's War, will shatter some of the prejudices around Nigeria, and make readers think about Britain's imperial legacy in a new way. Its real-life hero, Isaac Fadoyebo, was only a teenager when the British took him, and tens of thousands like him – "cannon-fodder" one British officer candidly told me – from west Africa to the jungles of Burma to fight the Japanese in the second world war. I came to know Isaac many decades later. He was a modest, self-effacing and scrupulously honest man, everything the loud and grasping caricature of a Nigerian is not. Here are 10 books that show Nigeria in all its cruelty and folly, but also its beauty, generosity and humour.

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

As a young man Achebe read the canon of western literature, but could not find his own people's story there. So he set about writing a tragic tale: of how a vulnerable society, and a flawed man, could not cope with the military superiority and crushing arrogance of the white invaders. Millions of readers around the world have since identified with Things Fall Apart as the definitive account of what happened to their own societies when the Europeans arrived. Invariably the colonial legacy was destructive and destabilising, and one that "Nigeria", a British invention, has never quite recovered from.

2. The Trouble With Nigeria by Chinua Achebe

No apologies for including Achebe twice. He wrote this caustic booklet in the early 80s, but it still rings true. This time, Achebe puts the blame for Nigeria's many post-independence failings firmly on the Nigerians themselves. "Nigeria is not a great country", he writes. "It is one of the most disorderly nations in the world. It is one of the most corrupt, insensitive, inefficient places under the sun … It is dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar. In short it is one of the most unpleasant places on earth!" And yet Achebe still believes in Nigeria's potential, if only it could find leaders with integrity.

3. The Nigerian Civil War by John de St Jorre

Nigerians – of all ethnicities – rarely talk about the civil war of the late 1960s, but it is a suppressed trauma. It began when the Igbo people of the east formed the doomed breakaway state of Biafra, and ended more than a million deaths later. No one can understand Nigeria today without some knowledge of those events, and John de St Jorre – a British journalist who covered the war for the Observer – wrote a brilliant account soon afterwards: a readable and scrupulously fair history of a conflict that aroused great passions across Africa and in Britain.

4. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You've read the history of the civil war, now read Adichie's novel. It's a story of ordinary people swept up in extraordinary times; a privileged young woman, an ambitious university lecturer, an illiterate houseboy and a British writer, all of whom struggle to stay faithful to their ideals, loyalties and loves as their world falls apart around them. Add colonialism, tribalism, class, race and sexual desire, and you have an epic.

5. Sozaboy by Ken Saro-Wiwa

Another haunting work of fiction to come out of the civil war. Ken Saro-Wiwa, executed by a military junta in 1995, was a writer, human rights activist and environmentalist. Sozaboy is written in "rotten English" – a mixture of Nigerian pidgin and idiomatic English – from the viewpoint of a naive young recruit who discovers the horror of war. William Boyd wrote: "Sozaboy is not simply a great African novel, it is also a great anti-war novel, among the very best the 20th century has produced."

6. Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo Saro-Wiwa

Noo is Ken Saro-Wiwa's daughter; she grew up in England and after her father was killed she stayed away from Nigeria for many years. This is the poignant and witty story of her return. Noo's family history gives her an unusual take on Nigeria; she's both intimate with the country and an outsider. Her "unglamorous, godforsaken motherland" will always be a place that angers and frustrates her but on her intrepid travels she also finds much to love.

7. My Nigeria by Peter Cunliffe-Jones

Cunliffe-Jones is a British journalist who lived in Nigeria during the transition from military to civilian rule at the end of the 90s. But the country was already part of his family folklore; his grandfather had been a colonial official there for 30 years, and helped write the 1960 independence constitution. Cunliffe-Jones dissects the British (and his family's) legacy in a history of Nigeria blended with personal memoir, and his conclusions are often harsh.

8. Ake by Wole Soyinka

Nobel laureate Soyinka's memoir of his childhood years is full of charm but is never sentimental. He grew up in Abeokuta, in the Yoruba south west, a medium-sized town that has supplied a disproportionate number of Nigeria's great and good. The young Soyinka is witness to a society torn between traditional and modernising forces, and some of the first protests against colonial rule in the 40s.

9. The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin

Shoneyin's novel deals with polygamy, rape and domestic abuse in a contemporary Nigerian family. Heavy issues, but her touch is so skillful that she finds redeeming features in even her wickedest characters, and comedy even in violence and cruelty. Baba Segi himself is foul, foolish and arrogant. He gets his come-uppance, and we learn much about Nigeria along the way.

10. Open City by Teju Cole

But it's about New York, you say, not Nigeria. True, but so many of Nigeria's brightest and best now live abroad, or at least with one foot abroad, so it's inevitable that more and more "writing about Nigeria" is from the diaspora and reflects its place in the wider world. Julius, the fictional narrator of Cole's beautiful novel, has flashbacks to his Nigerian childhood as he wanders around Manhattan. The memories float to the surface of his consciousness; they are part of his complex identity.

theguardian.