Product Description

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY DWIGHT GARNER, NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY |NPR | ||

NATIONAL BESTSELLER FINALIST, PHILLIS WHEATLEY BOOK AWARD TEJU COLE WAS NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL AFRICANS OF THE YEAR BY MAGAZINE

For readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Michael Ondaatje, is a wholly original work of fiction by Teju Cole, whose critically acclaimed debut, was the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by more than twenty publications.

A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the yahoo yahoo diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet caf, longs after a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused of stealing at a local market.

Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos lifecreative, malevolent, ambiguousand slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself.

In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven with original photos by the author, originally published in Nigeria in 2007is a wholly original work of fiction. This revised and updated edition is the first version of this unique book to be made available outside Africa. Youve never read a book like because no one writes like Teju Cole.

Praise for

A luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and return . . . extraordinary.

Cole is following in a long tradition of writerly walkers who, in the tradition of Baudelaire, make their way through urban spaces on foot and take their time doing so. Like Alfred Kazin, Joseph Mitchell, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (with whom he is often compared), Cole adds to the literature in his own zeitgeisty fashion.

Crisp, affecting . . . Cole constructs a narrative of fragments, a series of episodes that he allows to resonate.

Hugely rewarding . . . both a celebration of one of the worlds most vibrant cities and a lament over what can be one of the most frustrating and difficult places to live. It is also a story of family breakup and an uneasy homecomingthe narrator has been away for fifteen years and must relearn how to navigate a place that was once home.NPR

[ has] a restraint that allows [Cole] to slip in these exquisitely rendered observations on life, love, art that leave you feeling richer and more attuned to your own reality once youve finished reading.Dinaw Mengestu,