‘Chigozie Obioma is a writer to watch’ The Economist
Umuahia, Nigeria. Chinonso, a young poultry farmer, sees a woman attempting to jump to her death from a highway bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, Chinonso joins her on the roadside and hurls two of his most prized chickens into the water below to demonstrate the severity of the fall. The woman, Ndali, is moved by his sacrifice.
Bonded by this strange night on the bridge, Chinonso and Ndali fall in love. But Ndali is from a wealthy family, and when they officially object to the union because he is uneducated, Chinonso sells most of his possessions to attend a small college in Cyprus. Once in Cyprus, he discovers that all is not what it seems. Furious at a world which continues to relegate him to the sidelines, Chinonso gets further and further away from his dream, from Ndali and the place he called home.
In this contemporary twist of Homer's ODYSSEY, in the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about the tension between destiny and determination.
‘Chigozie Obioma truly is the heir to Chinua Achebe’ New York Time Book
Review
Author Biography
Chigozie Obioma was born in 1986 in Akure, Nigeria, and currently lives in the
United States. He is an assistant professor of Literature and Creative Writing
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His debut novel, The Fishermen, is winner
of the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Awards for
Debut Literary Work, and the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (Los Angeles
Times Book Prizes); and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize 2015, as well as
for several other prizes in the US and UK. Obioma was named one of Foreign
Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015.