Book of the month: A Fistful of Shells by Toby Green

Review by Thomas Beattie, Donor Acquisition & Innovation Manager at Opportunity International UK.

Toby Green’s A Fistful of Shells is one of the books that has stayed with me the most from a year spent reading about the history of colonialism in Africa. Many books describe the suffering and injustice of that period, but few explain so clearly how colonialism disrupted West Africa’s economies. It is history on an immense scale, telling of kingdoms, change, and loss.

Cowrie shells and cloth have long been central to West African life and served as currency in many societies. Green explains that they were more than money, they carried cultural and spiritual meaning. While West African states exported gold to Europe, their own currencies rapidly lost value as European traders imported huge quantities of cowries and mass-produced cloth. Markets were flooded, inflation soared, and goods that had always held value suddenly no longer did. These economic shocks also disrupted the social and spiritual systems built around these currencies, leaving communities unsettled and vulnerable.

In the chaos that followed, the slave trade grew, fuelled by violence as long-standing structures collapsed. Green is also clear that this change did not come only from outside forces. Some leaders sped up these shifts, using access to European traders to benefit themselves. In doing so, they weakened the systems of trust that had held their communities together for generations. This history created a distrust that, Green argues, still shapes how many people relate to authority and formal institutions today.

A Fistful of Shells is a sobering reminder that global orders shift. What has value one day may not the next. So much of the way things are today, thinking particularly of the work of Opportunity International in Ghana, is a direct result of economic violence of days gone by. This book reminds me of the importance of the work of me and my colleagues.

January: There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

Review by Mary Oakes, Chief Executive at Opportunity International UK.

One of my closest friends and I have kept up the tradition of Jólabókaflóð for the past eight years or so - the Icelandic custom of exchanging books on Christmas Eve. We are both devoted readers, but with quite different tastes. She gravitates towards the classics and more demanding, highbrow literature, while I can happily devour a chick-lit novel in a single sitting. I’ve loved every book she has chosen for me over the years, but Christmas 2024 marked a first: we had bought exactly the same book for each other.

The book was Elif Shafak’s latest novel, There are Rivers in the Sky, and I was hooked from the opening line:

“In ancient Nineveh, a storm brews, and a solitary raindrop falls from the sky, setting in motion a chain of events that will ripple through centuries.”

It is one of the most beautifully written novels I have read in a long time. Shafak tells an ambitious and intricate story, weaving together multiple centuries, protagonists, and themes, yet she does so with remarkable clarity and momentum. The novel never feels fragmented; instead, each thread deepens the others, drawing the reader steadily onwards.

At its heart, There Are Rivers in the Sky is a meditation on water - its sacredness, its scarcity, and its power to shape human lives and histories. It explores the people who seek to protect it, control it, and survive without it. Alongside this runs the story of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian text that was entirely new to me, and which Shafak uses to powerful effect as a bridge between past and present.

Most affecting of all, however, is her portrayal of the persecution of the Yazidi people over centuries, from their ancestral lands in northern Iraq to the precarity of displacement and life in refugee camps. Through the relationship between a young girl, Narin, and her grandmother, Ferida, Shafak shows how memory, faith, and storytelling become acts of resistance. Ferida’s stories do not simply recall the past; they protect, educate, and sustain Narin in the face of unbearable loss.

This is a novel that lingers long after the final page. It asks big questions about survival, belonging, and responsibility—both to one another and to the fragile world we share. That my friend and I, with our very different literary tastes, were drawn independently to the same book feels fitting. There Are Rivers in the Sky is rare in its ability to be both intellectually ambitious and emotionally profound, and it is a story I will be carrying with me for a long time to come.