- "Cell One" (first published in The New Yorker), in which a spoilt brother and son of a professor is sent to a Nigerian prison and ends up in the infamous Cell One.
- "Imitation" (first published in Other Voices) is set in Philadelphia and concerns Nkem, a young mother whose art-dealer husband visits only two months a year. She finds out that his lover has moved into their Lagos home.
- "A Private Experience" (first published in Virginia Quarterly Review), in which two women caught up in a riot between Christians and Muslims take refuge in an abandoned shop. This story highlights the friendliness and peace between two women with different religions, and makes the point that regardless of someone's religious beliefs , or their ethnic background, we are all ultimately human. It is told in a third-person narrative so that readers are put in an omniscient position to understand this idea.
- "Ghosts" (first published in Zoetrope: All-Story), in which a retired university professor looks back on his life.
- "On Monday of Last Week" (first published in Granta 98: The Deep End), in which Kamara, a Nigerian woman who has joined her husband in America, takes a job as a nanny to an upper-class family and becomes obsessed with the mother.
- "Jumping Monkey Hill" (first published in Granta 95: Loved Ones) is the most autobiographical story. Set in Cape Town at a writers' retreat where authors from all over Africa gather, it tells of the conflicts experienced by the young Nigerian narrator.
- "The Thing Around Your Neck" (first published in Prospect 99), in which a woman named Akunna gains a sought-after American visa and goes to live with her uncle; however, he molests her and she ends up working as a waitress in Connecticut. She meets a man with whom she falls in love, but along the way experiences cultural difficulties with him.
- "The American Embassy" (first published in PRISM international), in which a woman applies for asylum but ends up walking away, unwilling to describe her son's murder for the sake of a visa.
- "The Shivering", set on the campus of Princeton University, it concerns a Catholic Nigerian woman, whose boyfriend has left her, finding solace in the earnest prayers of a stranger who knocks at her door.
- "The Arrangers of Marriage" (first published as "New Husband" in Iowa Review), in which a newly married wife arrives in New York City with her husband; and finds she is unable to accept his rejection of their Nigerian identity.
- "Tomorrow Is Too Far" (first published in Prospect 118), in which a young woman reveals the devastating secret of her brother's death.
- "The Headstrong Historian" (first published in The New Yorker) covers the life-story of a woman called Nwangba, who believes her husband to have been killed by his cousins and is determined to regain the inheritance for her son through his education by missionaries. Though her son did not realise what she hoped, her granddaughter managed to retrieve it, highlighting the significance of holding on to one's past and one's origin in order to thrive in the future.
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