Chapter One Bookstore

USED COPY CONDITION: 1. Minor cover wear 2. Light spotting on page edges 3. Spine crease 4. Light foxing 5. Light stain 6. All pages are in very good condition PRICE: 5000 NGN 📌

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu They burned the tombs. They came for the books next. In 2012, armed zealots seized Timbuktu and began erasing 700 years of human thought. The manuscripts they hunted held mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and arguments for tolerance, all written by African Muslim scholars long before Europe claimed to have invented the Enlightenment. Standing between those books and the fire was a quiet librarian with no army, no weapons, and no backup. He smuggled hundreds of thousands of manuscripts out under the noses of killers, in rice sacks and on canoes. Here is the question this book forces on you: would you risk your life for a book? And if you wouldn't, what are you actually willing to protect? The world watched Timbuktu burn and mostly shrugged. The men who tried to destroy this knowledge shared a faith with the scholars who wrote it, which makes it an uncomfortable story for everyone who wants a simple villain. Some will say it proves that ideas are the most dangerous things on earth. Others will say that if a culture's memory can be wiped out in a weekend, it was never safe to begin with. Read it, then tell us who the real barbarians are. PRICE: 17,000 NGN 📌

SA'ADU ZUNGUR Sa'adu Zungur is one of the heroes of Nigeria’s anti-colonial struggle, but he is only gradually taking his rightful place in history. Unlike his disciple, Malam Aminu Kano, Zungur is mainly known as an effulgent poet. His contribution to Nigerian politics in general, and decolonisation in particular, is neither well documented nor widely appreciated. A progressive politician, visionary and erudite scholar, he was the main initiator of party politics in Northern Nigeria. A committed nationalist, he served from 1948-1950 as the National Secretary of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) and a champion of plural consciousness cutting across ethnic, cultural, religious and regional diversities aimed at enhancing pan-Nigerian nationalism. Critical of British imperialism, he was unpopular with the colonial establishment. In spite of prolonged, chronic ill-heath and sustained opposition from the officialdom, he demonstrated an enviable anti-imperialist prolificacy in verse and prose. A staunch federalist, he fought for a Nigeria founded on equity and justice based on a synthesis of the historical antecedents of its various communities and not the wholesale transplantation of British imperial institutions and procedures. This book is a biography of Zungur and a selection of his major socio-political writings, including, for the first time, the "seditious" poem Jihadin Neman Sawaba otherwise known as Wakar Addakari. Written with the general and specialised readers in mind, the introduction to this book simply and lucidly narrates Zungur’s life and times as never before. COVER PICTURE: Sa’adu Zungur in London as National Secretary of the NCNC and member of the party’s delegation to the United Kingdom, 3rd October 1949. PRICE: 10,000 NGN 📌

BAUCHI CORRESPONDENCE The transformation of the erstwhile Hausa city states and beyond into the Sokoto Caliphate, one of the largest, literate and heterogeneous indigenous polities in African history, has been recognised by historians as one of the most significant dimensions of the nineteenth century Islamic revolution popularly known as the Sokoto jihad. Dozens of emirates and sub-emirates emerged as a consequence. Official and personal correspondences, mainly in Arabic, (the official language of the Caliphate) and Hausa (the language of wider communication) written in ajami, served as one of the ways by which state business was conducted and relationships were established and maintained. This book presents a selection of 100 incoming letters from the chancery of Bauchi emirate. Written to four successive emirs (Yakubu 1805-1845, Ibrahim 1845-1877, Usman 1877-1883 and Umaru 1883-1902) from diverse sources, they highlight the issues, preoccupations, thoughts and concerns of the leaders and the people in a vast and plural entity. These primary source materials also show that the matter of governance and inter-group relations they grappled with in the nineteenth century were significantly similar to what nations and leaders deal with in the contemporary era. ――― The author, Alhaji Mahmood Yakubu, BA (Sok.), MPhil. (Cantab), DPhil. (Oxon) taught History at the University of Jos and the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna. His main research interest is the nineteenth century Sokoto Caliphate and its transformation into colonial and independent Nigeria in the twentieth century. He is the author, among others, of Emirs and Politicians: Reform, Reaction and Recrimination in Nothern Nigeria 1950-1966, Third Edition (Abuja, 2024) and Sa'adu Zungur: An Anthology of his Social and Political Writings, Second Edition (Abuja, 2025). He is also the co-editor (with Hamid Bobboyi) of The Sokoto Caliphate: History and Legacies, 1804-2004, 2 vols. (Kaduna, 2005). PRICE: 7000 NGN 📌 wa.me/message/7KSIJCE2WB6YO1

BUSINESS STRATEGY Jeremy Kourdi · The Economist · Third Edition Every great organization is built on a series of decisions. Most go unnoticed, but a few change everything. Strategy isn't luck, and it isn't reserved for the boardroom elite. It is a discipline, and the leaders who master it see opportunities before others do. They act with conviction while competitors hesitate, turning uncertainty into advantage. In this fully updated third edition, Jeremy Kourdi distills the world's most powerful strategic thinking into a clear, practical playbook. Drawing on the authority of The Economist, he shows you how to read your market, outmaneuver the competition, and align your people behind a vision worth pursuing. You'll learn to make bold decisions with clarity, and to build an organization that doesn't just survive change but leads it. The game is already in motion. The only question is whether you're calling the plays or watching from the sidelines. Think sharper. Decide better. Win bigger. PRICE: 6000 NGN 📌

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF PRE-COLONIAL BORNO For over two thousand years, one civilisation stood at the crossroads of a continent, and history books barely whispered its name. Now the silence breaks. Studies in the History of Pre-Colonial Borno, edited by Bala Usman and Nur Alkali, tears down the lazy myth of "tribal chiefs and endless wars" and unveils the real Borno: a powerhouse of trade, scholarship, faith, and fierce diplomacy, wired into the Hausa, Fulani, Tuareg, Arab, and beyond. Its story is the buried foundation of Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Cameroon, and Libya. Turbulent. Dazzling. Unforgettable. Read it, and you'll never see African history the same way again. PRICE: 5000 NGN 📌 wa.me/message/7KSIJCE2WB6YO1

FLAG BEARERS OF THE SOKOTO CALIPHATE History remembers conquerors. This book remembers the men who gave conquest meaning. Between 1804 and 1837, a group of scholars, soldiers, judges, and governors built something the modern African state has spectacularly failed to rebuild: a system where the most learned man in the room was also the most powerful. Where accountability was not a political slogan but a theological obligation. Where leadership was earned in the library before it was exercised on the battlefield. Their names were deliberately erased. Their flag was replanted as a symbol of terror. Their civilization was repackaged as a problem. This volume hands them back their faces. Editors Ibrahim M. Jumare, Shu'aibu Shehu Aliyu, and Abubakar Sama'ila have done what no colonial archive ever intended to make possible;, they have restored biography to men that the empire reduced to footnotes, and in doing so asked the question that still burns: If the Sokoto Caliphate produced this quality of leadership in its very first generation, what exactly has gone wrong with everything that came after? PRICE: 5500 NGN 📌

THE RETURN: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar The book received several prestigious literary awards and nominations. 🏆 Awards Won 1. 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography 2. 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize 3. 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award 4. 2016 Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 5. 2017 Geschwister-Scholl-Preis 6. Prix du Livre Étranger Inter / Le Journal du Dimanche 7. Premio Libro del Año, awarded by the Madrid Booksellers Guild 📖 Shortlists and Finalist Recognitions 1. 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction — Shortlisted 2. 2016 Costa Biography Award — Shortlisted 3. Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose — Finalist 4. National Book Critics Circle Award, Autobiography — Finalist The book was also named one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2016. PRICE: 13,000 NGN 📌 #HishamMatar #TheReturn #Literature #Memoir #BookLovers

NEXUS Every empire in history ran on a story. The next one will run on something that doesn't need us to believe it. For 70,000 years, humans ruled the planet because we could do one thing no other animal could: get millions of strangers to cooperate by sharing fictions. Gods. Nations. Money. Laws. Information was the thread, and we held the needle. Now, for the first time, the needle has a mind of its own. Nexus asks the question no one in power wants to answer: what happens when the stories that govern your life are no longer written by humans? When the algorithm that decides who gets a loan, a job, a prison sentence, or a war is not just faster than you, but unreadable to you? Yuval Noah Harari traces the hidden architecture of civilization, from clay tablets to the printing press to the machine that never sleeps, and reveals an unsettling pattern. More information has never meant more truth. It has meant more power, more control, and more beautifully organized delusion. The printing press gave us science. It also gave us the witch hunts. What will this give us? You are already inside the network. You have been for years. The only question left is whether you are still a participant, or just data. Read it before it reads you. PRICE: 17,000 NGN 📌

CALL OF DUTY Some lives are lived. Others are forged in the fire of history. Call of Duty is more than an autobiography—it is the remarkable story of a soldier, statesman, and nation-builder who stood at a defining crossroads in Nigeria’s history. With courage, discipline, sacrifice, and an unwavering sense of duty, Abdulsalami A. Abubakar offers a rare glimpse into the man behind the uniform and the decisions that shaped a nation. A powerful journey of service, leadership, resilience, and responsibility, this is a book about what it means to answer the call when history comes knocking. Read the story. Discover the man. Relive the moments that changed a nation. PRICE: 40,000 NGN 📌

BEYOND FAIRY TALES Some men inherit thrones. Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman inherited one and walked away from it to stand in front of a classroom. Born into Katsina royalty, he chose the harder crown: pursuing truth. What followed was a life spent tearing down the comfortable myths — the "fairy tales" — that colonial and elite historiography had told about Africa, and replacing them with something far more powerful: a history rooted in evidence, in the voices of ordinary people, and in the conviction that Africans were never bystanders in their own story. This collection gathers the sharpest of his writings — essays that refuse to separate the past from the present, scholarship from struggle, or intellect from integrity. Usman believed history was not a museum piece but a weapon for justice, a lens for understanding the forces still shaping nations today. He trained a generation of scholars, challenged presidents and professors alike, and never once let privilege dull his loyalty to the people. Beyond Fairy Tales is more than a tribute to a brilliant historian; it is an invitation. An invitation to question inherited narratives, to dig for the real story beneath the myth, and to believe, as Usman did, that understanding our history is the first act of building our future. For students, scholars, and anyone who has ever wondered what the truth costs — and what it's worth. PRICE: 3000 NGN 📌

THE PROPHET KAHLIL GIBRAN On the eve of his departure, a wise man is asked about love, work, joy, sorrow, freedom, and death. His answers have comforted and awakened readers for generations. Gibran's timeless poetry reveals that love is both wing and fire, that joy and sorrow are woven from the same cloth, and that work is love made visible. With a new introduction and annotations by Suheil Bushrui, this edition opens the book's spiritual and poetic depths as never before. Read it slowly. Return to it often. Let it remind you who you were always meant to be. PRICE: 15,000 NGN 📌

SURROUNDED BY LIARS How to Stop Lies and Half-truths Ruining Your Life Every day, you make decisions based on what people tell you. But what if the story you're being sold isn't the whole story? From the international bestselling author of Surrounded by Idiots comes the book that will change how you listen, how you trust, and how you lead. Lies don't always arrive in dramatic betrayals. They hide in polite smiles, convenient omissions, and half-truths that cost you time, money, and peace of mind. But here's the good news: you don't have to be a victim of deception. You can become someone who sees clearly, speaks boldly, and builds relationships on solid ground. With sharp insight and the colorful, human approach that has helped over 10 million readers worldwide, Thomas Erikson reveals how to spot the signs, ask the questions that uncover the truth, and protect yourself without becoming cynical. Stop being fooled. Start being free. This is your guide to a life built on truth. PRICE: 5500 NGN 📌

EMIRS AND POLITICIANS As chief executives in Britain’s model colonial administration in Africa, the emirate aristocracies of Northern Nigeria, accustomed for over half a century to a cosy collaboration with the British, were wary of the looming challenge to their considerable authority by an emergent political class. The resulting competition for power during the terminal phase of indirect rule pitched the emirs against party politicians who insisted that the former could not continue to function in their Lugardian purity. The reforms that followed led to purges in which a large number of old guard emirs unamenable to change were deposed. Based on primary source material, this book examines the impact of political and administrative changes in Northern Nigeria during the period of decolonisation (the 1950s) and early independence (1960–1966). The focus is on the emirate aristocracies while the emphasis is on the emirs’ reaction to change and its consequences on their statutory authority and its extensive privileges. “Superbly researched, clearly written, authoritative.” A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford “...a detailed and illuminating account of ...how the young men that formed the Northern People’s Congress managed to create their own kind of ‘indirect rule’ that kept the emirs both in their place and on the party’s side.” Murray Last, University College London PRICE: 10,000 NGN 📌

A FRAGILE BOY AND AN AIR FORCE OFFICER A Fragile Boy and an Air Force Officer is the autobiography of Group Captain Murtala Osuolale Salami (rtd). It follows him from a sickly childhood, sheltered by his grandmother, to the Nigerian Military School in Zaria and a rise from boy soldier to Air Force officer. It also covers his forced retirement, his life as a civilian, his efforts to develop his hometown of Erin-Ile in Kwara State, neighbourhood association politics, and his devotion to his family. PRICE: 14,000 NGN 📌

MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME She was a storm in a small town: fierce, brilliant, impossible to love and impossible to leave. Mary Roy took on the laws of inheritance, built a school from nothing, and raised a daughter on a mixture of shelter and cruelty. In this memoir, Arundhati Roy returns to the woman who shaped her, defied her, and haunted her. From a childhood in Kerala's river country to the making of a writer and a fearless public voice, she traces a bond that was both refuge and wound. Fierce, tender, and unflinching, this is a portrait of a mother, a daughter, and the strange freedom that comes from finally telling the truth. PRICE: 18,000 NGN 📌 wa.me/message/7KSIJCE2WB6YO1

GUNS, GERMS & STEEL It wasn't superiority. It was geography — and that might be worse. For centuries, the story of conquest was a story of destiny: some peoples were simply built to rule, and others to be ruled. Jared Diamond takes that comforting lie and incinerates it. The truth is colder and stranger — the fate of civilizations was decided tens of thousands of years ago by the shape of continents, the axis of trade routes, which wild grasses happened to grow where. Steel didn't crown the strong. Germs didn't punish the weak. Chance did. That's the disturbing part. If it wasn't destiny or virtue that built empires and buried others, if it was accident of soil and latitude, then every hierarchy we've built to explain the winners and the losers since is a story we told ourselves after the fact. No one earned this world. No one deserves what they inherited from it. Diamond didn't just rewrite history. He took away civilization's oldest excuse. PRICE: 18,000 NGN 📌

COMPLETE SET OF DIARY OF A WIMPY KID Over 300 million copies sold. There's a reason. Every child who "doesn't like reading" is one great book away from becoming a reader. Diary of a Wimpy Kid is that book, again and again. Greg Heffley's world of awkward friendships, family chaos, and spectacular bad decisions is so funny and so relatable that kids finish one volume and reach for the next. The doodle-filled pages keep reluctant readers turning pages, and every laugh builds the habit of reading. This is more than a book. It's a series that has turned hesitant kids into devoted readers around the world, and it's the easiest gift to get right for any child aged 7 to 14. The complete collection is on our shelf. Start one, and they'll want them all. PRICE: 5000 EACH 📌 wa.me/message/7KSIJCE2WB6YO1

THE LOYALIST A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice Loyalty is the most celebrated virtue in politics. It is also the most profitable lie. Bolaji Abdullahi spent years at the heart of power, where devotion is demanded, rewarded, and quietly weaponised. In this memoir, he asks the question no insider dares to ask aloud: What happens to a person who gives everything to a system that was never loyal to them? Here, loyalty is a currency, trust is a transaction, and sacrifice is something others spend on your behalf. Behind every handshake is a calculation. Behind every promise is a price. And somewhere between conviction and compromise, a man must decide who he is willing to become. The Loyalist does not flatter the powerful, and it does not spare the faithful. It forces you to confront an uncomfortable possibility: that the people who serve most loyally are not the system's heroes but its most useful instruments. You may finish this book admiring its author. You may finish it furious. You will not finish it unchanged. Are you loyal to a cause, or only to the people who benefit from your loyalty? PRICE: 15,000 NGN 📌

ZUWAN TURAWA NIJERIYA TA AREWA ...Nan baya mun fara bayyana muku yadda duk ƙasar Hausa ta cika da labaru iri-iri game da zuwan Turawa. Tun ana ba da labarin yadda suka yi wa Kwantagora da Bida, har ga shi labari kuma ya tabbata, abu ya zo baki da hanci, ga su a Zariya! Har ma labari ya watsu ko ina sun fitad da sarkin Zazzau sun naɗa wani. Saboda haka babbar alƙarya kamar Kano ai ba ta kwanta ba, sai shiri. Tun daga Sakkwato har Ilorin, ba labarin da a ke yi sai cewa a ke yi ai Kano tana nan tana shirin gagarumin yaƙi da Turawa. To, ainihin abin da ya kai Turawa, shi ne gudowar da Magaji ya yi daga Kafi ne ya zo Kano, bayan ya kashe wani Bature da a ke kira Kyaftin Moloney. Da ya zo Kano, sarki ya amshi baƙuncinsa, ya ɓoye shi. Har ma sarki ya riƙa cewa, "Haba, 'yar ƙaramar ƙasa ma kamar Kafi ta yi wannan aiki, ina ga Kano?" Turawa fa suka dage lalle sai sun kamo Magaji ɗin nan. Sa'an nan kuma ana cikin wannan magana, sai Turawa suka sami labari wai wani samanja daga cikin sojansu da ya je wannan maganar ba ta tabbata a haka ba, sai dai a nan gaba za ku ji yadda Turawa suka tarar da ɗaya daga cikin sojansu a kurkukun Kano, ya rame, ya zama duk ƙasusuwa, saboda wahala. Ku tuna fa jama'a, a lokacin nan ƙasan nan ba wanda ke zaune lafiya, domin lokaci ne na kamakarya, wanda ya fi ƙarfi kuwa shi ne wanda zai kama… PRICE: 3000 NGN 📌 wa.me/message/7KSIJCE2WB6YO1

DISCIPLINE IS DESTINY Every great life is built the same way: one hard choice at a time. Talent fades. Motivation wavers. Circumstances shift without warning. But the person who has mastered themselves can stand in the middle of any storm and keep moving forward. That is the quiet power the Stoics understood, and the one Ryan Holiday brings roaring back to life. Drawing on the wisdom of ancient philosophers and the stories of those who conquered their impulses, their fears, and their excuses, Discipline Is Destiny shows that self-control is not about deprivation. It is about freedom: the freedom to choose who you become instead of being ruled by every craving, distraction, and passing mood. You were never meant to be a slave to your appetites. You were meant to be the master of your own will. Your future is not decided by luck. It is decided by what you do when no one is watching, when it's hard, and when quitting would be easier. Take command of yourself. Everything else follows. PRICE: 5500 NGN 📌