Also of interest ... dispatches from Africa

Conversations With Myself

by Nelson Mandela

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)

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In recent decades, “books by and about Nelson Mandela have become practically a literary genre of their own,” said Peter Godwin in the London Guardian. This collection of Mandela’s letters, diaries, and calendar entries might thus seem like an afterthought. But because his voice is unfiltered here, Conversations offers the “fullest picture yet” of the man whose journey from protest to prison to the presidency is central to the 20th-century history of South Africa.

Spellbound

by Karen Palmer

(Free Press, $25)

Karen Palmer’s in-depth look at the practice of witchcraft in contemporary West Africa effectively “refutes the notion that our modern world is becoming smaller and more scrutable,” said The Atlantic. Palmer focuses on 3,000 Ghanaians who were tried by their government for practicing sorcery and banished to remote “witch camps.” The story captures a world where “deep-seated superstitions remain among the prime movers of daily life.”

The Black Nile

by Dan Morrison

(Viking, $27)

Dan Morrison’s riveting account of traversing the world’s longest river by plank boat is proof that Africa remains “the continent par excellence of rip-roaring adventure,” said Tahir Shah in The Washington Post. “Packed with narrow scrapes and brazen feats of adventure,” the book is at its best when Morrison turns his attention to “ordinary life in the hamlets and villages” along the Nile, showing readers a side of Africa “rarely glimpsed in the mass media.”

The Masque of Africa

by V.S. Naipaul

(Knopf, $27)

V.S. Naipaul seems always to be delivering bad news from a distant land, said Thomas Meaney in Bookforum. For his 34th book, the Nobel laureate visited Africa to examine the contentious relationship there between Christianity, Islam, and various indigenous beliefs. His conclusion, that “the spiritual resources of Africa are tragically limited,” isn’t really surprising. Forty years ago, after all, he declared that the continent had “no future.”