KADUNA STATE UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF ART AND HUMANITIES
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND GRAMMER
COURSE CODE: LIT 316
COURSE TITTLE: SPECIAL AUTHOR
PRESENTED BY GROUP 6
LECTURER NAME: PROF., A. K BABAJO
NOVEMBER, 2025
GROUP MEMBERS
Rukayya Yakubu
Jemima Dantata
Patience Samson
Khadija Nura
Asmau Sagir Musa
Naima Aminu Adam
Zainab Abdullahi
Favour Suleiman
Adikwu Esther Gift
Elizabeth Vincent
Salim Muhammad Mukhtar
Ruth Bitrus Ariknenyer
Amos Peace Garba
Hauwa’u Muhammad Nasir
Ahmad Aliyu Auwal
Najaatu Ahmed
Afoma Jessica Ezeaku
Maryam Sani Aliyu
Blessing Iyanuoluwa Olumuyiwa
Samuel Judith Yanshiyi
Rufaida Yahya Muhammad
Amina Muhammad Suleiman
Introduction:
Love is one of literature’s oldest lenses for exploring human experience: an emotion that simultaneously reveals the tender interior of characters and the fault-lines of culture, politics, and history. This essay compares and contrasts the treatment of love in two contemporary Nigerian novels: Hadiza Bagudu’s Fantah and Lizi Ashimole’s The Other Insider. Though different in setting, style, and scope, both novels use love as a central organising theme — and as a vehicle to examine identity, power, community, and the tensions between tradition and change. I begin with compact summaries of each book, then map their major love-threads (romantic, familial, communal, and metaphoric), analyse narrative technique and gender politics, and finally compare their social functions: how each novel uses love to critique or uphold social structures. Evidence and publication details are drawn from author pages, reviews, and publisher descriptions.
Brief summaries and contexts Fantah (Hadiza Bagudu)
Hadiza Bagudu’s Fantah is a historical/romantic novel that follows Fantah, a Bororo (Fulani) girl from a nomadic community, and her journey across landscapes and social worlds. The novel traces Fantah’s longing for love and belonging as she encounters royal courts, political intrigue, and cross-cultural encounters. As reviewers and the author’s own site describe it, Fantah mixes historical romance, adventure, and cultural portraiture, and foregrounds a heroine whose “only ambition was to fall in love and ‘be’ in love” even as larger political and social forces shape her fate. The book is structured episodically and maps movement across physical geography alongside emotional passage.
The Other Insider (Lizi Ashimole)
Lizi Ashimole’s The Other Insider is a socio-historical, multi-voiced novel that stitches together several epochs and characters to examine otherness, belonging, and the nation’s social fractures. Reviews describe it as “at once a love story and a metaphor of a nation that fails to anchor its vagaries in the deep waters of hope and justice.” The narrative does not centre on a single protagonist but uses multiple perspectives across time to explore intimate relationships set against conflicts of religion, ethnicity, and social change. Love in Ashimole’s novel is both personal and allegorical — a force that binds and exposes a fractured polity.
How each novel defines “love”: scope and primary registers
Both novels treat love in plural terms, but each privileges particular registers.
• Fantah foregrounds romantic and affective longing. Fantah’s quest is personal: the aspiration to meet, choose, and be chosen. The novel invests in the inner life of its heroine and in the rituals, customs, and constraints that shape romantic possibilities in a pre-modern/early-modern Sahelian world. Love here is experiential and developmental — Fantah’s emotional education is the plot’s engine. hadizabagudu.com
• The Other Insider treats love as both interpersonal and civic/metaphorical. While individual relationships are central, Ashimole often uses them as microcosms of social integration and exclusion. Romantic entanglements, friendships, and familial loyalties are rendered in ways that comment on nation-building, religious conversion, and the politics of welcome versus rejection. Love therefore operates at two levels: as intimate feeling and as a symbol for the project (or failure) of belonging.
Romantic love: idealism, agency, and constraint Fantah: romantic idealism in a traditional world
In Fantah, romantic love is framed as an almost telic aspiration — Fantah longs to “fall in love and be in love” — and that longing shapes the plot’s moral and emotional logic. The novel presents romance as an arena for negotiation between desire and duty: Fantah’s choices are constrained by kinship, rank, and the politics of marriage alliances. Romantic agency exists, but it is always dialectical: individual feelings press against communal norms (e.g., arranged marriage, honor codes) and economic or political exigencies. Bagudu uses the heroine’s inner monologues and social encounters to show how a subject learns to convert private longing into socially intelligible action: courting, negotiation, migration, and, at times, compromise. This gives the romantic plot a Bildungsroman quality — Fantah’s emotional maturation parallels her widening social awareness.
The Other Insider: fragmented romances inside a fractured polity
Ashimole’s treatments of romantic love are often less solitary and more embedded in communal fault-lines: lovers’ choices intersect with religious conversion, ethnic tension, or political opportunism. Because the narrative disperses attention among multiple protagonists and epochs, romance appears as episodes that illuminate larger patterns (e.g., an interfaith relationship revealing the pressures of sectarian identity). Love in The Other Insider is thus less about an individual’s interior growth and more about the social consequences of love: who is accepted, who is othered, and how intimate ties either bridge or reinforce collective divides. The multiplicity of voices prevents any single love story from becoming purely sentimental — instead, each romance becomes an argument about integration and exclusion.
Familial love and obligations
Both novels depict family as a critical mediator of love — but they stage family obligations differently.
• In Fantah, family and clan structures are formative. The Bororo familial network prescribes gender roles, movement, and marriage practices; Fantah’s choices must reckon with filial duty and clan honor. Family love, therefore, is often bound up with obligations, rituals, and survival strategies in a pastoral environment. The novel treats familial love not merely as emotional shelter but as an institutional power that governs access to romantic possibilities.
• In The Other Insider, family functions as both refuge and site of contestation. Familial loyalties intersect with historical traumas and political calculations: parents’ choices about education, religion, or migration shape children’s intimate possibilities. Ashimole’s novel shows how familial love can reproduce exclusionary norms but also resist them — sometimes a child’s love becomes the catalyst for inter-generational reconciliation or, alternatively, renewed conflict. The multiplicity of familial arrangements in the book foregrounds love’s instability when families are dispersed, transformed by conversion, or politicised.
Communal love, belonging, and otherness
A major divergence between the novels is the scale at which each imagines communal belonging.
• Communal cohesion in Fantah is rooted in a specific cultural world (Bororo/Fulani, royal courts, trading routes). Love — especially when it crosses cultural boundaries — raises questions about assimilation and identity. Fantah’s mobility makes her a figure who both embodies the Bororo world and negotiates access to other worlds (courtly life, settled towns). In this sense, love is a mechanism through which cultural exchange happens, but it also foregrounds asymmetries: who must change, who keeps their identity, and who pays the social cost of crossing boundaries.
• Communal belonging in The Other Insider is explicitly political and national. Love stories become metaphors for the nation’s capacity to love its “others.” Where Fantah localises communal life, Ashimole universalises it — the novel’s title itself suggests insiders and outsiders, and love is the test by which inclusive identities are formed or denied. The book asks whether intimate bonds can override structural exclusion, and often finds the answer ambivalent: love can both subvert and perpetuate exclusionary social orders.
Gender, power, and the politics of desire
Both novels interrogate gender and power, but with different emphases.
• Fantah centres a female subject in a historical adventure-romance: her desire is central, and the narrative often foregrounds the limitations placed on women’s mobility and autonomy. Yet Bagudu’s portrayal of Fantah’s agency — her choices in love, her resilience in face of political threats — offers a redemptive reading of female subjectivity within a patriarchal frame. Love becomes a space where feminine agency can be exercised, negotiated, and sometimes reclaimed.
• The Other Insider uses multiple female and male perspectives to interrogate how gender intersects with religion, ethnicity, and class. Romantic relationships are sites where gendered expectations (honor, chastity, breadwinning) reveal structural inequities. Ashimole’s multi-voiced approach allows nuanced scenes where women’s desires are often constrained not only by patriarchal norms but also by political ideologies (e.g., religious movements that redefine gender roles). Consequently, love in Ashimole’s novel frequently becomes a battleground for competing visions of gender justice.
Narrative strategies and style: how form shapes the theme of love
Formally, the novels handle love through different narrative techniques that influence readers’ emotional engagement.
• Linear, heroine-centred narrative (Fantah). Bagudu uses a more conventional, linear narrative focused on a central heroine. This directness allows close psychological access to Fantah’s feelings and affords readers sympathetic alignment. Romantic suspense, adventure episodes, and courtly intrigue create an emotional arc where love’s triumphs and losses feel personal and conclusive. The novel’s historical romance genre expectations (quest, separation, reunion) produce a rhythm that reinforces romantic idealism.
• Polyphonic, episodic structure (The Other Insider). Ashimole’s multi-voiced and time-spanning structure resists a single emotional centre. The novel’s episodic quality foregrounds how love appears in diverse contexts and invites comparative reading: an interfaith marriage in one epoch echoes a different intimate betrayal in another. This fragmentation compels readers to see love’s recurring forms across historical moments, thus turning intimate narratives into social commentaries. The result is a less sentimentalized but more ethically probing portrait of love.
Symbolism and motifs: nature, travel, religion, and exchange
Both novels use recurring motifs to deepen the thematic weight of love.
• Travel and landscape. In Fantah, movement across grasslands, desert, and trading routes mirrors emotional passage; the nomadic horizons embody freedom and constraint simultaneously. Travel functions as both literal plot device (bringing lovers together or apart) and symbol (the risk and possibility inherent in love).
• Religion and conversion. In The Other Insider, religious change and ritual play large symbolic roles: conversion, church communities, and sectarian contestations structure how love is accepted or stigmatized. Religious motifs therefore convert personal attachments into moral and political tests.
• Other motifs. Both novels use social rituals — marriage customs, court ceremonies, funerary rites — to mark transitions in love’s life-cycle. These motifs indicate that love is never purely private but is always ritualized and socially accountable. Tone and ideological stance: optimism vs ambivalence A striking difference between the two books is tone.
• Fantah tends toward romantic optimism (even if tempered by setbacks). Its heroinecentred structure and adventure-romance frame often lead toward restorative resolutions — love as a possible redemptive force within cultural constraints. Readers leave with the sense that personal longing can be fulfilled even in difficult social conditions.
• The Other Insider reads as ambivalently critical. Ashimole uses love to diagnose social failure rather than providing easy solutions. Love appears powerful but insufficient to overcome structural injustice or entrenched othering; sometimes love exposes the impossibility of communion rather than accomplishing it. This ironic or critical posture invites readers to see love as diagnostic rather than merely redemptive.
Comparative summary: convergences and divergences Convergences
1. Both novels treat love as multi-dimensional — romantic, familial, and communal — and show how intimate ties illuminate wider social realities.
2. Each work foregrounds the interaction between private desire and public structures (custom, religion, politics), arguing that love is socially embedded and often constrained by institutional forces.
3. Both authors use ritual and social practice (marriage, conversion, court ceremonies) as narrative devices to test the durability and adaptability of love.
Divergences
1. Scale and scope: Fantah privileges the individual heroine’s romantic quest within a bounded historical-cultural world; The Other Insider disperses attention across time and characters to make love a national metaphor.
2. Narrative form: Bagudu leans on linear, sentimental-epic romance conventions; Ashimole uses polyphony and fragmentation to produce sociological critique.
3. Ideological tone: Fantah is largely optimistic about personal fulfilment; The Other
Insider is more ambivalent and critical about whether love can heal structural injustices.
Conclusion
Hadiza Bagudu’s Fantah and Lizi Ashimole’s The Other Insider use love to achieve different but complementary ends. Bagudu’s novel shows how romantic longing can drive personal transformation and cultural encounter, emphasising affective possibility even within restrictive structures. Ashimole’s novel, by contrast, uses love as a diagnostic instrument: it reveals the limits of intimacy in the face of structural divisions and national failure to embrace its “others.” Read together, the novels remind us that love is both a deeply private pursuit and an index of social health; it can be a source of personal redemption and a mirror for social fracture. Each book therefore enlarges our understanding of love’s ethical and political stakes in contemporary African fiction.
References:
Bagudu, H. Fantah. AuthorHouse, 2014. (Publication details and bibliographic entry). Google Books
Hadiza Bagudu — official site. “Fantah” (summary and chapter extracts). hadizabagudu.com “Fantah by Hadiza Bagudu: A Review.” AfricanWriter.com (review and thematic commentary). africanwriter.com
Ashimole, Lizi. The Other Insider. Kraft Books / regional publishers (2025). (Publisher description and critical reception noted on publisher and review sites.) facebook.com+1
“The Other Insider” — Fahimta Books (book page and description). fahimta.ng
Nigerian News Source — review: “Lizi Ashimole’s ‘The Other Insider’ – a fresh, bold voice”
(June 2025). nigerianewssource.com.ng
FACULTY OF ART AND HUMANITIES
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND GRAMMER
COURSE CODE: LIT 316
COURSE TITTLE: SPECIAL AUTHOR
PRESENTED BY GROUP 6
LECTURER NAME: PROF., A. K BABAJO
NOVEMBER, 2025
GROUP MEMBERS
Rukayya Yakubu
Jemima Dantata
Patience Samson
Khadija Nura
Asmau Sagir Musa
Naima Aminu Adam
Zainab Abdullahi
Favour Suleiman
Adikwu Esther Gift
Elizabeth Vincent
Salim Muhammad Mukhtar
Ruth Bitrus Ariknenyer
Amos Peace Garba
Hauwa’u Muhammad Nasir
Ahmad Aliyu Auwal
Najaatu Ahmed
Afoma Jessica Ezeaku
Maryam Sani Aliyu
Blessing Iyanuoluwa Olumuyiwa
Samuel Judith Yanshiyi
Rufaida Yahya Muhammad
Amina Muhammad Suleiman
Introduction:
Love is one of literature’s oldest lenses for exploring human experience: an emotion that simultaneously reveals the tender interior of characters and the fault-lines of culture, politics, and history. This essay compares and contrasts the treatment of love in two contemporary Nigerian novels: Hadiza Bagudu’s Fantah and Lizi Ashimole’s The Other Insider. Though different in setting, style, and scope, both novels use love as a central organising theme — and as a vehicle to examine identity, power, community, and the tensions between tradition and change. I begin with compact summaries of each book, then map their major love-threads (romantic, familial, communal, and metaphoric), analyse narrative technique and gender politics, and finally compare their social functions: how each novel uses love to critique or uphold social structures. Evidence and publication details are drawn from author pages, reviews, and publisher descriptions.
Brief summaries and contexts Fantah (Hadiza Bagudu)
Hadiza Bagudu’s Fantah is a historical/romantic novel that follows Fantah, a Bororo (Fulani) girl from a nomadic community, and her journey across landscapes and social worlds. The novel traces Fantah’s longing for love and belonging as she encounters royal courts, political intrigue, and cross-cultural encounters. As reviewers and the author’s own site describe it, Fantah mixes historical romance, adventure, and cultural portraiture, and foregrounds a heroine whose “only ambition was to fall in love and ‘be’ in love” even as larger political and social forces shape her fate. The book is structured episodically and maps movement across physical geography alongside emotional passage.
The Other Insider (Lizi Ashimole)
Lizi Ashimole’s The Other Insider is a socio-historical, multi-voiced novel that stitches together several epochs and characters to examine otherness, belonging, and the nation’s social fractures. Reviews describe it as “at once a love story and a metaphor of a nation that fails to anchor its vagaries in the deep waters of hope and justice.” The narrative does not centre on a single protagonist but uses multiple perspectives across time to explore intimate relationships set against conflicts of religion, ethnicity, and social change. Love in Ashimole’s novel is both personal and allegorical — a force that binds and exposes a fractured polity.
How each novel defines “love”: scope and primary registers
Both novels treat love in plural terms, but each privileges particular registers.
• Fantah foregrounds romantic and affective longing. Fantah’s quest is personal: the aspiration to meet, choose, and be chosen. The novel invests in the inner life of its heroine and in the rituals, customs, and constraints that shape romantic possibilities in a pre-modern/early-modern Sahelian world. Love here is experiential and developmental — Fantah’s emotional education is the plot’s engine. hadizabagudu.com
• The Other Insider treats love as both interpersonal and civic/metaphorical. While individual relationships are central, Ashimole often uses them as microcosms of social integration and exclusion. Romantic entanglements, friendships, and familial loyalties are rendered in ways that comment on nation-building, religious conversion, and the politics of welcome versus rejection. Love therefore operates at two levels: as intimate feeling and as a symbol for the project (or failure) of belonging.
Romantic love: idealism, agency, and constraint Fantah: romantic idealism in a traditional world
In Fantah, romantic love is framed as an almost telic aspiration — Fantah longs to “fall in love and be in love” — and that longing shapes the plot’s moral and emotional logic. The novel presents romance as an arena for negotiation between desire and duty: Fantah’s choices are constrained by kinship, rank, and the politics of marriage alliances. Romantic agency exists, but it is always dialectical: individual feelings press against communal norms (e.g., arranged marriage, honor codes) and economic or political exigencies. Bagudu uses the heroine’s inner monologues and social encounters to show how a subject learns to convert private longing into socially intelligible action: courting, negotiation, migration, and, at times, compromise. This gives the romantic plot a Bildungsroman quality — Fantah’s emotional maturation parallels her widening social awareness.
The Other Insider: fragmented romances inside a fractured polity
Ashimole’s treatments of romantic love are often less solitary and more embedded in communal fault-lines: lovers’ choices intersect with religious conversion, ethnic tension, or political opportunism. Because the narrative disperses attention among multiple protagonists and epochs, romance appears as episodes that illuminate larger patterns (e.g., an interfaith relationship revealing the pressures of sectarian identity). Love in The Other Insider is thus less about an individual’s interior growth and more about the social consequences of love: who is accepted, who is othered, and how intimate ties either bridge or reinforce collective divides. The multiplicity of voices prevents any single love story from becoming purely sentimental — instead, each romance becomes an argument about integration and exclusion.
Familial love and obligations
Both novels depict family as a critical mediator of love — but they stage family obligations differently.
• In Fantah, family and clan structures are formative. The Bororo familial network prescribes gender roles, movement, and marriage practices; Fantah’s choices must reckon with filial duty and clan honor. Family love, therefore, is often bound up with obligations, rituals, and survival strategies in a pastoral environment. The novel treats familial love not merely as emotional shelter but as an institutional power that governs access to romantic possibilities.
• In The Other Insider, family functions as both refuge and site of contestation. Familial loyalties intersect with historical traumas and political calculations: parents’ choices about education, religion, or migration shape children’s intimate possibilities. Ashimole’s novel shows how familial love can reproduce exclusionary norms but also resist them — sometimes a child’s love becomes the catalyst for inter-generational reconciliation or, alternatively, renewed conflict. The multiplicity of familial arrangements in the book foregrounds love’s instability when families are dispersed, transformed by conversion, or politicised.
Communal love, belonging, and otherness
A major divergence between the novels is the scale at which each imagines communal belonging.
• Communal cohesion in Fantah is rooted in a specific cultural world (Bororo/Fulani, royal courts, trading routes). Love — especially when it crosses cultural boundaries — raises questions about assimilation and identity. Fantah’s mobility makes her a figure who both embodies the Bororo world and negotiates access to other worlds (courtly life, settled towns). In this sense, love is a mechanism through which cultural exchange happens, but it also foregrounds asymmetries: who must change, who keeps their identity, and who pays the social cost of crossing boundaries.
• Communal belonging in The Other Insider is explicitly political and national. Love stories become metaphors for the nation’s capacity to love its “others.” Where Fantah localises communal life, Ashimole universalises it — the novel’s title itself suggests insiders and outsiders, and love is the test by which inclusive identities are formed or denied. The book asks whether intimate bonds can override structural exclusion, and often finds the answer ambivalent: love can both subvert and perpetuate exclusionary social orders.
Gender, power, and the politics of desire
Both novels interrogate gender and power, but with different emphases.
• Fantah centres a female subject in a historical adventure-romance: her desire is central, and the narrative often foregrounds the limitations placed on women’s mobility and autonomy. Yet Bagudu’s portrayal of Fantah’s agency — her choices in love, her resilience in face of political threats — offers a redemptive reading of female subjectivity within a patriarchal frame. Love becomes a space where feminine agency can be exercised, negotiated, and sometimes reclaimed.
• The Other Insider uses multiple female and male perspectives to interrogate how gender intersects with religion, ethnicity, and class. Romantic relationships are sites where gendered expectations (honor, chastity, breadwinning) reveal structural inequities. Ashimole’s multi-voiced approach allows nuanced scenes where women’s desires are often constrained not only by patriarchal norms but also by political ideologies (e.g., religious movements that redefine gender roles). Consequently, love in Ashimole’s novel frequently becomes a battleground for competing visions of gender justice.
Narrative strategies and style: how form shapes the theme of love
Formally, the novels handle love through different narrative techniques that influence readers’ emotional engagement.
• Linear, heroine-centred narrative (Fantah). Bagudu uses a more conventional, linear narrative focused on a central heroine. This directness allows close psychological access to Fantah’s feelings and affords readers sympathetic alignment. Romantic suspense, adventure episodes, and courtly intrigue create an emotional arc where love’s triumphs and losses feel personal and conclusive. The novel’s historical romance genre expectations (quest, separation, reunion) produce a rhythm that reinforces romantic idealism.
• Polyphonic, episodic structure (The Other Insider). Ashimole’s multi-voiced and time-spanning structure resists a single emotional centre. The novel’s episodic quality foregrounds how love appears in diverse contexts and invites comparative reading: an interfaith marriage in one epoch echoes a different intimate betrayal in another. This fragmentation compels readers to see love’s recurring forms across historical moments, thus turning intimate narratives into social commentaries. The result is a less sentimentalized but more ethically probing portrait of love.
Symbolism and motifs: nature, travel, religion, and exchange
Both novels use recurring motifs to deepen the thematic weight of love.
• Travel and landscape. In Fantah, movement across grasslands, desert, and trading routes mirrors emotional passage; the nomadic horizons embody freedom and constraint simultaneously. Travel functions as both literal plot device (bringing lovers together or apart) and symbol (the risk and possibility inherent in love).
• Religion and conversion. In The Other Insider, religious change and ritual play large symbolic roles: conversion, church communities, and sectarian contestations structure how love is accepted or stigmatized. Religious motifs therefore convert personal attachments into moral and political tests.
• Other motifs. Both novels use social rituals — marriage customs, court ceremonies, funerary rites — to mark transitions in love’s life-cycle. These motifs indicate that love is never purely private but is always ritualized and socially accountable. Tone and ideological stance: optimism vs ambivalence A striking difference between the two books is tone.
• Fantah tends toward romantic optimism (even if tempered by setbacks). Its heroinecentred structure and adventure-romance frame often lead toward restorative resolutions — love as a possible redemptive force within cultural constraints. Readers leave with the sense that personal longing can be fulfilled even in difficult social conditions.
• The Other Insider reads as ambivalently critical. Ashimole uses love to diagnose social failure rather than providing easy solutions. Love appears powerful but insufficient to overcome structural injustice or entrenched othering; sometimes love exposes the impossibility of communion rather than accomplishing it. This ironic or critical posture invites readers to see love as diagnostic rather than merely redemptive.
Comparative summary: convergences and divergences Convergences
1. Both novels treat love as multi-dimensional — romantic, familial, and communal — and show how intimate ties illuminate wider social realities.
2. Each work foregrounds the interaction between private desire and public structures (custom, religion, politics), arguing that love is socially embedded and often constrained by institutional forces.
3. Both authors use ritual and social practice (marriage, conversion, court ceremonies) as narrative devices to test the durability and adaptability of love.
Divergences
1. Scale and scope: Fantah privileges the individual heroine’s romantic quest within a bounded historical-cultural world; The Other Insider disperses attention across time and characters to make love a national metaphor.
2. Narrative form: Bagudu leans on linear, sentimental-epic romance conventions; Ashimole uses polyphony and fragmentation to produce sociological critique.
3. Ideological tone: Fantah is largely optimistic about personal fulfilment; The Other
Insider is more ambivalent and critical about whether love can heal structural injustices.
Conclusion
Hadiza Bagudu’s Fantah and Lizi Ashimole’s The Other Insider use love to achieve different but complementary ends. Bagudu’s novel shows how romantic longing can drive personal transformation and cultural encounter, emphasising affective possibility even within restrictive structures. Ashimole’s novel, by contrast, uses love as a diagnostic instrument: it reveals the limits of intimacy in the face of structural divisions and national failure to embrace its “others.” Read together, the novels remind us that love is both a deeply private pursuit and an index of social health; it can be a source of personal redemption and a mirror for social fracture. Each book therefore enlarges our understanding of love’s ethical and political stakes in contemporary African fiction.
References:
Bagudu, H. Fantah. AuthorHouse, 2014. (Publication details and bibliographic entry). Google Books
Hadiza Bagudu — official site. “Fantah” (summary and chapter extracts). hadizabagudu.com “Fantah by Hadiza Bagudu: A Review.” AfricanWriter.com (review and thematic commentary). africanwriter.com
Ashimole, Lizi. The Other Insider. Kraft Books / regional publishers (2025). (Publisher description and critical reception noted on publisher and review sites.) facebook.com+1
“The Other Insider” — Fahimta Books (book page and description). fahimta.ng
Nigerian News Source — review: “Lizi Ashimole’s ‘The Other Insider’ – a fresh, bold voice”
(June 2025). nigerianewssource.com.ng
