An Author’s Review: How the Sky Went Up and Other Stories My Father Told Me

By temitope MARCUS

Temitope Marcus

This book was born out of memory.

I grew up in a home where stories were not only read from pages but spoken into the night. When "NEPA took the light", we’d spread a mat outside, gather under the moon, and listen as my father brought animals, skies, rivers, and tricksters to life with his voice. Those stories made us laugh, confused us, warned us, and stayed with us long after the night ended.

When the Sky Went Away and Other Stories My Father Told Me is my attempt to preserve that tradition.

The essence of this book is to honour and carry forward the oral storytelling culture of African homes, ensuring its passage to the present generation and those yet to come. In an era where children’s imaginations are increasingly shaped by social media and imported narratives, many of which reflect foreign values more than our own, this book offers something familiar, rooted, and proudly African.

The stories in this collection are intentionally unpolished in spirit. They are humorous, exaggerated, and sometimes unhinged in the way folktales are meant to be. These tales do not always explain themselves neatly, because African folktales were never meant to. They were meant to be listened to, laughed at, and remembered.

More than entertainment, these stories carry lessons about greed, cleverness, consequences, and curiosity. They invite children to think, to question, and to recognise themselves in the rhythms and values of the stories their parents and grandparents once heard.

This book is for children discovering these stories for the first time, and for adults who remember what it meant to sit quietly and listen. Above all, it is a love letter to storytelling, to parents who told tales without books, and to nights when darkness made room for imagination.