Books from Comoros

A Girl Called Eel follows a seventeen-year-old from the Comoros archipelago who leaves her island and sets out alone into the open sea. Adrift and facing the growing reality of her situation, she begins to recount her entire life. The novel is written as a single unbroken sentence, structured in short couplets that give each memory its own pulse while sustaining one continuous flow of language.

Eel moves between two states of mind and between two islands, assembling her past in vivid fragments. Her memories surface with purpose: she recalls them to hold on to everything she has lived, even as her physical circumstances narrow. The structure mirrors her urgency. There is no pause, no chapter break, no place where the voice rests. The form itself carries the tension of someone speaking against time.

The Comoros is a small volcanic archipelago in the Indian Ocean, situated between the eastern coast of Africa and northern Madagascar. Ali Zamir sets his story in this specific geography, where rock, sea, and distance between islands shape daily life. The book's single-sentence form and its young narrator's determined recall make the landscape and the stakes feel immediate and close.

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In Bibi's Kitchen gathers 75 recipes and personal accounts from grandmothers in eight African countries that border the Indian Ocean: South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Comoros, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, and Eritrea. Somali chef Hawa Hassan and food writer Julia Turshen assembled the collection. Bibi is a Swahili word for grandmother, and these women stand at the center of every chapter.

Each dish arrives with the circumstances that shaped it. Ma Shara teaches visitors in Zanzibar how to make her ajemi bread with carrots and green pepper. Ma Vicky, who left Tanzania and now lives in suburban New York, cooks matoke, a stew of plantains, beans, and beef. Ma Gehennet of Eritrea contributes kicha, a flatbread, and shiro, a stew of ground chickpeas.

The coastline these countries share carried the spice trade for centuries, and several of them still export goods such as pepper and vanilla. That commercial history sits beside quieter subjects: families separated by war, the practical work of beginning again in another country, and the way a familiar meal keeps a household connected to the place it came from.

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The Kaffir of Karthala is a novel by Comorian writer Mohamed A Toihiri, set in the Comoros, the small island nation in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and the Mozambique coast. Karthala is the active volcano that dominates Grande Comore, the largest island in the archipelago. The story follows Mazamba, a married man who learns he has only a few days left to live. Aware that time is closing in, he begins an affair with a French woman named Aubéri, and the relationship shifts the way he sees the world around him.

Mazamba's remaining days bring him face to face with entrenched racism, political corruption, and rigid assumptions held both locally and abroad. The novel sketches a society where old hierarchies and modern life exist side by side, and where a figure called Marshal Kabaya casts a satirical shadow over the country's political landscape. In the time he has left, Mazamba sets out to confront conditions he had previously accepted.

Toihiri writes from a place that rarely appears in international fiction. The Comoros has a complex history shaped by successive waves of settlement, trade, and French colonial rule, and the novel draws on that layered background to frame one man's late reckoning with the structures that surround him.

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