A Biography of A Nation

Quramo Publishing Limited is pleased to introduce our new title, A Platter of Gold, a thrilling tour through a critical period leading to Nigeria’s independence. In this critically acclaimed new work, Olasupo Shasore, SAN, explores the premise that the British Empire handed Nigeria over on a platter of gold; without struggle, without incident.

A Platter of Gold begins where Possessed left off –  in 1906 and ends with the independence of Nigeria in 1960.

A Platter of Gold tells the story of the eight colonial pro-consul governors and the under-celebrated, sometimes everyday Nigerians who pitched wit and guile against them to demand their rights and freedom.

The Iva Valley  Massacre of Enugu resulted in the death of 21 miners in 1949.

We learn about Ahmadu Attahiru I, the Sokoto Caliph and his cavalry, who violently resisted British ouster and occupation; Eleko and the Lagos Chieftains, who first claimed they would “rather die than pay tax”; Nwanyewura of Oloko and her intelligent trio who said, “We will not pay tax till the world ends”. There are the scores of women of Opobo who led the women’s war against taxation: Alimotu Pelewura and the market women who would not “sell their country” for personal gain, but instead asked for free trade.

Michael Imoudu and his worker’s union paralysed the nation’s economy under a general strike for native workers’ rights and equality; Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta Women’s Union demanded native participation in government and women’s liberation; the miners of Iva Valley Enugu, including the twenty-one killed, mounted a go-slow strike for equal treatment and respect for natives in their work place.

The Oloko encounter with Nwanyeruwa led to a massive uprising that spread across the nation

A Platter of Gold is an exciting, epic colonial biography of a nation.

How did Nigeria come to be a nation? What manner of country is she? Who are Nigeria’s other heroes?
This is a story of Nigeria’s history as well as the history of Nigeria’s story.
The other story!

Olasupo Shasore, SAN, is a barrister, arbitration practitioner and historian. He was chairman, Lagos History Committee that produced a seminal two-volume work titled, History of Lagos from Earliest Times. He is the author of Possessed: History of the Crown Colony of Lagos 1861 – 1906, and a children’s book, The King & the Colony.

Shasore lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

A Platter of Gold is his second book.

Bury Me Come Sunday Afternoon: Series 3

Today, we have the third excerpt from Apartment 24, the first story in the upcoming collection, Bury Me Come Sunday Afternoon. For our new readers, we have already published two excerpts, so catch up with the first and second parts before continuing.

When I arrived at work at 7 p.m., Damon was at the front desk, listening to music through his earphones with his head down. When I tapped him on the shoulder, he took off the headphones, looking shamefaced. I cut him off as he greeted me. “Damon, man, you got to be kidding me!”

I put my lunch bag and Tamuno’s bag of food under the counter.

“Let this be the last time I catch you doing this when you should be paying attention to the door!”

“Is there a problem, young men?” Mr Theodore shouted as he walked out from the door of the basement stairwell behind us.

His office was in the basement next to the recreation room. I could hear the sound of his laboured breath long before his rotund belly caught up with us at the counter. Damon responded that there was no problem. Mr Theodore looked at me.

“There’s no problem, boss. Damon was just leaving for the night,” I said. Damon agreed quickly and picked up his messenger bag under the counter.

He looked at me and said, “Oh, Mr Tamuno came by. He had to go out. He said you should drop his food in his crib.”

I nodded. I was not surprised. Tamuno was gone most evenings. Damon waved and ran out through the glass doors. When he was gone, Mr Theodore leaned over the counter.

“That boy is going to get fired soon!” Flecks of his Trinidadian accent mixed with his American accent, a sign that he was getting angry.

“Take it easy with him, boss,” I said. “Why are you always taking up for that boy? He ain got no manners!”

He shook his head and told me he caught Damon sleeping at the front desk a few minutes after he resumed work that morning and this was not the first time. I reminded him that Damon was also a deejay at a nightclub to make ends meet. Mr Theodore waved his hand in disregard and started to walk away. I called him back. I had something to ask him. He looked down at me from under his bushy brows and asked how much I needed.

“It’s my mother. She’s sick.”

“I didn’t ask you why you needed the money but how much.”

When I told him, he nodded and said the check would be ready by the time I clocked out the next morning. I promised to pay him back on Friday when I got paid. This will be the last time I ask him for money. I had a good feeling about the job interview at Tamuno’s workplace.

To read the rest of Apartment 24 and all the other stories in Bury Me Come Sunday Afternoon, pre-order a copy of the book at a 20% discount. Offer open only till July 5th, 2016.

Bury Me Come Sunday Afternoon: Series 2

Yesterday, we began the countdown to the release of Nike Campbell-Fatoki’s Bury Me Come Sunday Afternoon.  Read the first excerpt if you have not done so already. The story is continued below.

 My shift ended at 7 a.m. I enjoyed the graveyard shift unlike Damon and Leroy, my colleagues. They preferred to spend their nights partying. I reminded myself that they were just in their early twenties and I had a good ten years on them. My shift gave me an opportunity to search for jobs once I got back to my hole-in-the-wall apartment. Now that I had graduated after six years of part-time school, I needed to get a professional job.

When I opened the door to my apartment, my eyes locked with the beady eyes of the black rat that had been tormenting my life for weeks, nibbling on my bread, tearing into my sofa bed and leaving droppings all over the apartment. It was perched on top of my sofa bed. I dropped my lunch bag and ran towards it. It was faster. It ran into the kitchen and disappeared behind the stove. I pulled the stove out of its spot and bent down to look. It had escaped through a hole into my neighbour’s apartment. I pushed the stove back in place. I feared I had spilled my lunch of leftover peppered chicken when I hastily dropped my lunch bag onto the floor to catch the vermin, but it was still intact when I opened it. My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was my younger sister, Titi. Her tiny voice sounded frantic.

“Brother Ade, Mama is sick! She has typhoid but the hospital won’t keep her. They need a deposit.” She started crying uncontrollably.

“Typhoid? How did she get that?” I screamed into the phone. A heavy thud from the floor followed. It was Mr Savoy. He lived in the apartment below me. He hit the ceiling with his walking stick whenever he heard a pin drop.

I sat down on the wood floor, not caring about the noise I made.

“I don’t know. Brother, we don’t have the money for private hospital. And you know it’s better to keep her at home than take her to the General Hospital.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get some money across. Just go and borrow for now and I’ll repay it. Tell whoever you ask that your brother in the US will refund it, with interest. Just get her to the hospital.”

“Yes, brother.”

“All right. I –” The call cut off. There was no more credit on her phone. We had talked for too long anyway. I have to remember to include money for phone credit when I send the money for the hospital bills.

I spent the rest of the day cooking a large pot of designer stew. The aroma filled the apartment. The smell of naija food made me feel close to home, especially at a time like this. I had learned how to cook while growing up because my parents would leave for work at 5 a.m. and return at 7 p.m. I had to either warm meals or cook for my sister and me.

Cooking for Tamuno happened by chance. I was eating behind the receptionist counter, next to the waiting area when he walked by one night. He sniffed the air and walked up to me as I gulped down my balls of garri wrapped in ẹfo riro. He asked if I was Nigerian.

Pre-order a copy of the book here for a limited time only at a 20% discount.

New Book Alert: Bury Me Come Sunday Afternoon

We are thrilled to announce the release of Bury Me Come Sunday Afternoon, a short story collection by Nike Campbell-Fatoki.

For the next seven days, we will be releasing excerpts from the first story, Apartment 24. Please enjoy the first excerpt below:

I knocked on the door of apartment twenty-four for the third time. The smell of iru (locust beans) filled the hallway. If I do not get this food in soon, occupants of the second floor will call Mr Theodore, the building manager, about the odd smell in the building. I shook my head and knocked louder. Footsteps approached the door. Tamuno opened it, his towel wrapped around his waist; dark hair covered his broad chest. When he looked down at me, his shaved head glistened. He looked well-groomed with a goatee.

“Bros, good evening,” I said, handing him the plastic bag of food.

“You try for me, Ade. I swear! Ever since you introduced me to this restaurant I’ve been hooked! They put something for the food?” Tamuno joked. I chuckled.

He invited me into the living room. I walked in as he grabbed his wallet on the arm of the recliner. He pulled out a wad of dollar bills and began to count them. I looked away. The living room was furnished with expensive furniture – the dark brown recliner complemented the seven-seater leather sectional and ottoman. He pressed the dollar bills into my hand and walked me to the door.

“That’s for your transportation and for tomorrow’s lunch. Please buy me the stew with cow feet and ponmo next time.”

I chuckled and teased him about the weight he would start gaining. When we got to the door, I reminded him of the IT position I applied for at his workplace.

“Did you have a chance to talk to the HR. manager yet? You’re one of my references, bros.”

“I haven’t had a chance. You know I just got back from this business trip, and I’m in the middle of bringing my wife over.”

“Oh yes! Congrats! When does she arrive?”

He smiled.“She’ll be here in less than a month!”

“You said she’s a minister’s daughter, right? Which one?” I asked.

“Not that it matters, but she’s the daughter of the Minister of Works and Housing.”

His phone rang somewhere in the apartment. He said he had to go.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” He closed the door in my face before I could answer.

You may also listen to the author on SoundCloud. Pre-order a copy at a 20% discount from now till the 5th of July 2016.

Book Review: The Progress of Love by Alice Munro

Because we are all born and will die it can seem convenient to imagine the trajectory of life as a straight line connecting these two major events but anyone with any modicum of introspection can deduce that this is not the case. The path of one’s life, though assumed to be better the more linear it is, seemingly because a straight line is more perfect that a jagged squiggle, is hardly ever one continuous uninterrupted train ride from beginning to end, otherwise palm readers would have been out a job a millennia ago and life would be very boring and predictable. In the journey of a life there would be many moments, instances and events that will forcibly shift things, changing perspectives and causing inner spiritual rebirths. Also, when the path of your life changes all the variables will change too and the outcome of that shift will infinitely multiply the possibilities of the person you will become.

The funny thing is most of the time the changes don’t come heralded, there is no pulsating beam of light from the heavens, no mystical signs or wailing choir of Angels  proclaiming that everything is about to change or that something significant is about to happen. And so it was that on a seemingly ordinary day in London during my many habitual trips to Borders I discovered Alice Munro and my life changed.

Alice Munro, a quick Google search will tell you, is an 84 year old Canadian short story writer who is tremendously revered and exceptionally gifted in her chosen prose form. She has several awards including the Booker prize for fiction won in 2009 at age 77 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.  She has written 11 short story collections but I will pick just one to talk about in an attempt to highlight how and why I feel she shifted the trajectory of my life for the better.

The Progress of Love was published in 1986 and is a collection of eleven stories all about people living in an unspecified time but in provincial, small town Canada. I have always believed that the best type of writers have a narrow field of focus but can write deeply and eloquently about their chosen point of view in a way that says something universal that anyone can understand and relate to. In one of the stories called “Jesse and Meribeth” for example she describes the friendship between two teenaged school girls and how one event over the summer changed them and revealed something pertinent about their true character. Alice Munro has this amazing trick of writing stories that feel like novels where she completely elucidates a person, their entire psyche and soul by describing one event in their life which at first seems ordinary or mundane. And the really clever thing about her writing is that you can never guess or phantom the ending or the “twist” so to speak until you read the whole thing because she builds it up, furnishing the story with intricate details until she reveals the core of the story.  A quote might suffice at this point

“…..I saw MaryBeth shut in, with her treats and typewriter, growing sweeter and fatter….but myself shedding dreams and lies and vows and errors, unaccountable. I didn’t see that I was the same one, embracing, repudiating. I thought I could turn myself inside out, over and over again, and tumble through the world scot free.”(Jesse and Meribeth- the progress of love pg188)

In another story titled “Lichen” she describes a man (David) and his much younger girlfriend (Catherine) who visit his ex wife (Stella) with whom he has grown up children and still maintains a cordial, platonic and almost maternal relationship with. She manages to capture so many emotions that lie between the formerly married couple and tries to define the mysterious thing in some men that makes them perennially unsatisfied in their relationships and repeatedly causes them to be unfaithful. Here’s another quote;

“.. It was strange the way they said these things. They used to say bitter and wounding things and pretend when they said them to be mildly amused, dispassionate, even kindly. Now this tone that was once pretense had soaked down, deep down, through all their sharp feelings and the bitterness, though not transformed, seemed stale, useless and formal.” (Lichen- the progress of love, pg 54)

Arguably the best story in this collection, although they are all superb in their own way, is “A Queer Streak”. This one is particularly amazing because of the breadth of years it covers thus enhancing its novel like feel and because it has the most interesting and unexpected twist. I really want to quote from this one too but it’s too hard, I’d literally have to write down the entire thing.

The unifying theme of course in these stories is love, the different forms of it and how it changes over the years. It describes love as a mysterious thing, hallmarked by a tremendous sacrifice or important event that reveals something pertinent about human nature. It describes the love between married and divorced couples, friends, and siblings in deep, rich and revealing ways. After reading my first Alice Munro story I could no longer appreciate a lot of other writers. She completely elevated my expectations and I no longer required books to just amuse and entertain me but to educate me, to open up locked up portions of myself to me, to reveal and mould a more unique and tangible view of life, my own life and my relationships with others. I cannot recommend her highly enough and with that I’ll leave one last quote;

“I knew that “gone” meant dead…………the word “gone” seemed full of nothing but a deep relief and even excitement- the excitement you feel when a door closes and your house sinks back to normal and you let yourself loose into all the free space around you. That was in my father’s voice, too-behind the apology……but my mother hadn’t been a burden-she hadn’t been sick a day and far from feeling relieved at her death, my father took it hard. He never got used to living alone….” (The progress of love –the progress of love pg 1)

 

QPL Interviews: Obinna Udenwe

Obinna Udenwe is the author of the award winning works of fiction, Satans & Shaitans and Holy Sex.

 

Obinna Udenwu

He took time out to answer some questions. Enjoy the interview:

What is a regular day like for you?

I do not work for anyone so I have lots of time for myself – to do my work, read books and do my researches, write stories, edit my works in progress, and visit friends or go drinking. I take every day as it comes.

What is your guiding philosophy as a writer? What advice would you give upcoming novelists?

My philosophy is to work hard, hard, and hard and learn while working. Writing is like mathematics, if you do it every day, you master the skill and become better. To upcoming novelists, I say: never give up, and never be in a hurry to publish your work.

When did you decide you wanted to write? How much support were you given?

I started serious writing in the year 2005, after I completed my secondary school education. I was lucky to have received lots of love and support from friends and family. My dad’s friend gave us a gift of a computer so I typed my stories with it after writing them on paper. I had friends and relatives, who were very willing to read the drafts, edit and make suggestions – one of such persons was Simeon Opoke – a cousin of mine who worked with me on my novel for over two years never asking for anything in return.

With the running themes of crime, intrigue, and action, Satans and Shaitans is relatively unique in today’s African literature; it is a throwback to the era of Pacesetters. Why did you choose to write on these themes?

I think we have enough highbrow literary fiction in Africa – and you know what they say about eating one kind of food every day, all the time, you either get malnourished or something. So I think Africa needs diverse writers, especially for us to be able to build the African literary tradition – we need writers of crime, conspiracy, fantasy, erotica etc., etc. So yes, Satans and Shaitans is unique in the sense that it moved away from the normal narrative to an action-packed form of writing, while still maintaining an oral narrative that is fluid and paced. So I chose to write on the themes because I wanted to tell a story that mirrors the realities on ground in Africa today – the insurgency crisis that has killed thousands of people in East and West Africa, the political instability in the continent and how this affects the growth of the economy and governance, and the religious dogma and foolishness that is the bane of our common existence as a people.

What, to you, is the best thing you have ever written?

I only have one full length novel for now, so perhaps in a few years to come when I must have published two or three more I would be able to answer correctly. But I am a well published short story writer, and I think that out of all my short stories the erotica titled ‘A Temporary Affair’ published in January this year by Expound Magazine is the best. Then there is the ‘Holy Sex’ series on Brittle Paper which is the most widely read post ever on that platform.

 

QPL Interviews: Masande Ntshanga

Masande Ntshanga

 

Masande Ntshanga is the winner of the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award in 2013, and a finalist for the Caine Prize in 2015. He was born in East London in 1986 and graduated with a degree in Film and Media and an Honours degree in English Studies from University of Cape Town, where he became a creative writing fellow, completing his Masters in Creative Writing under the Mellon Mays Foundation. He received a Fulbright Award, an NRF Freestanding Masters scholarship, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship and a Bundanon Trust Award. His work has appeared in The White Review, Chimurenga Chronic, VICE and n + 1. He has also written for Rolling Stone magazine.

Why do you write?

This might be becoming a cliche, I feel I have to. It’s a compulsion. I don’t feel as at ease, or as capable of joy, without arranging the world in the manner in which writing provides.

Tell us about the first thing you ever wrote.

There are too many to reach back into memory for—that vie for that position—but the first thing I ever published was a story about teenagers who broke into people’s houses and painted manifestos on their walls. I wrote it in one sitting, I think, home from boarding school, and it was close to me.

The Reactive was so immersive; there are moments where the reader is literally getting high with ‘Nathi. How were you able to narrate it all in so clear a voice?

Thank you. I appreciate that. To be honest, and I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but the structure of the book, or how Nathi perceives the world when he’s both lucid and high, is close to my own experience of reality; to how I experience it when I arrange it in my head. It wasn’t that difficult to translate that into what the book needed; the challenge was mostly in figuring out how to maintain it for the length of a novel. I’m glad you picked up on it.

In your writing career, has there ever been a time when you wanted to sound or write like someone else? Who was it and why did you want to sound or write like them? What changed?

Definitely.  In university, especially, I was taken by Ralph Ellison and Dambudzo Marechera. I was in awe of what they’d achieved in Invisible Man and The House of Hunger, respectively. Though Ellison is sometimes identified as an impressionist, I was enthralled with how the two of them had reshaped modernism for their own ends; and how they’d done so as black artists. Of course, this also came from the visceral impact their work had had on me, and in the end, I couldn’t resist. I was a student preoccupied with being “high-minded”; and the two of them gave me plenty of that, while also being searing and experimental. Theirs felt like the only way to do it for a long time, but I was mistaken, of course.

Throughout history, we have always recognised certain geographical places as points where artists seem to thrive – Athens, French Riviera, New York; Cape Town has been spoken of as such a haven. Do you feel living in CT has had any sort of influence on your work?

I think you’ve just made me want to move back—almost. Cape Town operates well as a microcosm of South African society in that all the fractures that exist within it are brought out in high relief. They’re far reaching as well, given its legacy of slavery and colonialism, and these surroundings can make solid contributions to your work, if your subject matter is that way inclined, but as far as it being a city that takes care of artists in general, I would have to express my reservations. I wouldn’t give that to Johannesburg, either, most likely. You still have to brace yourself in the grid.

Defrag Your Sentences

Writers are constantly reminded to be concise, to cull the unnecessary word. While this is generally a good advice, writers can leave out essential elements of a sentence in the process and cull necessary words instead.

Fragments are incomplete sentences

Incomplete sentence disrupt the flow and confuse readers. Usually, fragments are pieces of sentences that have become disconnected from the main clause. The fragment fails to be a sentence in the sense that it cannot stand by itself. This mere group of words may seem to act like a sentence but do not have the wherewithal to make it as a complete thought.

The problem with sentence fragments is that they aren’t always easy to spot. Many think you can judge whether a sentence is complete or not by simply checking if it has a subject and a verb. It’s not that straightforward. While these two elements of a complete sentence are a necessary conditio sine qua non, a full sentence must also give birth to a complete thought.

How can we determine if a sentence is complete? Try asking the following:

• Does the sentence have a subject?
• Does the sentence contain a verb?
• Does the sentence form a complete thought that can stand on its own?

If you score one NO, you’ve identified a sentence fragment, and fixing it is generally easy.

If it’s missing, add the missing element (subject, verb, complete thought) to the fragment

• Incorrect: Waited for the writers’ conference to start.
• Correct: She waited for the writers’ conference to start.
• Incorrect: Reto spent the night implementing a new feature in BookGarage. Also fixed a bug.
• Correct: Reto spent the night implementing a new feature in BookGarage. He also fixed a bug.

Attach the sentence fragment to another sentence

Fragments often are dependent clauses or phrases (that is, which cannot stand on their own). By adding the fragment to an independent clause (that is, one which can stand on its own), you can form a full sentence and a complete thought. This is also the place where you may need to add a comma, too.

• Incorrect: Until I finish another chapter tonight.
• Correct: Until I finish another chapter tonight, I’m not going to bed.
• Correct: I’m not going to bed tonight until I finish another chapter.

Remove the word that makes it a fragment

We said fragments show up when they are missing one crucial element, but some linger there until the writer culls an unnecessary word.  Most of these fragments start with prepositions or conjunctions. By removing these words, you can usually make a complete sentence.

• Incorrect: Because we’re out of funds.
• Correct: We’re out of funds.
• Incorrect: When the spaceship back from Jupiter lands this January.
• Correct: The spaceship back from Jupiter lands this January.

Happy Writing

Author

Massimo Marino
COO and co-founder

BookGarage

(Reposted with permission from http://bookgarage.com/blog/2016/01/31/defrag-your-sentences/)

 

Book Review: Aminatta Forna’s ‘The Memory of Love’

Memory of Love starts leisurely, taking you into the internal workings of the mind of an old man, his frail state and his small world. You learn how he preserves his memories, and how he visits them frequently, and how being at the end of his life there is nowhere else to go but to the past, inwards, and what does he find? How happy is he with all that has transpired; his role in other people’s lives?

Aminnatta Forna is a skilful weaver. She creates characters that have fully formed and very rich internal worlds with languid phrases and a melancholy tone, using light brush stokes to create a picture of loss, of love, and of memory itself. In parts the information is very detailed, clinical and scientific but it never feels heavy. A significant portion of the story focuses on the psychological aspects of war and the invincible scars it leaves behind in the mind. Minor characters with varying signs of damage come and go in the novel, people with indeterminate disorders that need understanding. This helps to create an idea of a country that experienced a frisson and is now trying to heal itself from the outside in. This is where the heroes come in.

One of the four main characters, British psychologist Adrian Lockheart has a moment where a tiny sunbird catches his attention and he pauses to sketch it, he thinks in part,

“Somebody, Adrian forgets who – once told him that if humans were to fly they would require chest muscles six feet deep to raise their own weight. He wonders now if this could possibly be right. Or if it is one of those beliefs of which there are so many small and large, carried from childhood to adulthood without question. He did know the birds expended so much energy in flight they needed to drink twice their body weight in nectar a day. Such effort expended in the mere fact of existence. Sometimes nature’s ways did not bear scrutiny, only a result; a beauty that bursts the banks of logic.”

Paragraphs like this abound in this Commonwealth prize winning novel. Aminatta Forna freezes ordinary moments in time and deconstructs them, giving insight, slowly drawing you in.  Adrian, it is expertly established, is an idealist, who has come to a war torn African country (Sierra Leone) to make a difference. He has left behind his daughter and a wife who steadily tires of trying to understand him and soon he starts to settle in, meeting people and trying to find his purpose.  He believes the memory of war is catastrophic, indelible. That no one who outlives a war truly survives it in their mind. He arrives in the country with a vague aim of healing this rift.

The novel is narrated by different characters in intermittent chapters, one of whom is Elias Cole, an old man now dying of an incurable lung disease. He voluntarily checks himself into a psychiatric unit and begins to confess to Adrian in sessions which form the core of the novel. We travel with him back in time to the days of his youth and get seeped into his accounts of a golden evanescence when he was young his country was peaceful and he attended house parties characterised by intellectual discussions. He reveals all these from a personal diary which also charts the most significant event in his young life, his deep obsessive love for Saffia, a beautiful woman married to Julius Kamara, a more deserving and charismatic man. Nearing his end it is evident that Elias Cole wants to unburden himself, and his story is tauntingly told, chapter by skipped chapter, the tension building slowly until the eventual reveal.

Adrian’s final companion is Kai Mansaray, an orthopaedic surgeon with whom he forms a strong bond and who like the other men is steeped in his own memories of loss, who is looking to heal and be healed. Looking at a young boy whose leg is mangled by sarcoma and due to be amputated, Kai thinks, “death, so often ugly, can often arrive in the guise of such beauty”  and this line in a way captures much of what is depicted and seen by Adrian in a country trying to recover from a devastating war. Where people are still walking around shell shocked, piecing together what remains. The ugliness of war contrasts with the tender beauty in trying to recover from it, to move on.

Each one of these three men become slowly but inextricably linked as their stories are woven together tenderly. At the centre of their lives is a woman from whom they receive redemption and find a common understanding. Memory of love tells a very human story about betrayal through inaction, friendship as companionship, love as absolution and war in the devastation not just of the body, or infrastructure but as a tear in consciousness that creates an altered state, a fragile intangible world.  This ambitious and affecting novel is about conscience and the need for redemption through confession, through transcendent love and through healing.

Editor

 

QPL INTERVIEWS: TOLU FALODE

The QPL interviewee for our ‘Rebirth’ month is the beautiful Tolu Falode.

Tolu Falode is a law graduate, writer, blogger and motivational speaker. She shares stories from her heart to help people advance in their faith, relationships and destiny. She is the author of Gift of Grace.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Tolu Falode. I’m a law graduate, blogger, writer, and motivational speaker. I enjoy meeting people, sharing ideas, talking about faith and relationships to help people move forward in life.

 

2. Last year, you published your book ‘Gift of Grace’. What was the motivation behind your writing this book?

Gift of Grace was in more ways than one, the genesis of who I have become after losing my brother Toba. I wrote it primarily because I felt like his story needed to be heard and I was the only one positioned to tell it. I was in pain but God gave me strength to proceed with what needed to be done: allow Toba’s voice to be heard.

 

3. How was it for you, writing a story this deeply personal?

It was difficult but it was also therapeutic. I was able to connect with my emotions through words-somehow writing filtered my thoughts into recognizable feelings and it helped me immensely through the pain.

 

4. Are you ready to write another book?

I certainly haven’t stopped writing-I write all the time now-it seems like I can’t even stop! So yes, I am ready to write another book but its not the right time yet. I am still working on sharing Gift of Grace with the local and international community.

 

5. In addition to writing, you are also a blogger and recently just started vlogging; vlogging is a new form of expression, tell us how you got into it and how it’s been so far.

I got into vlogging because I just felt like it was time for me to extend my platform for helping people. And now I share my thoughts and my tips on dealing with faith, relationships and destiny on my Youtube page: Tolu Falode.

It was really an organic decision-I first started writing on my blog, and then decided to start doing audio messages and somehow that evolved into making a visual presentation to connect more with my audience. I’m really happy with this decision so far. I’m excited to see where it will lead me. The journey is just beginning!

Her book Gift of Grace is available at bookstores.

Tolu Falode shares messages on: tolufalode.com

And on her Youtube page: Tolu Falode.