In 1990s Akure, Nigeria, while their father's work takes him away from home, four brothers — Ikenna, Boja, Obembe, and Benjamin, the nine-year-old narrator — slip off to fish the forbidden, polluted Omi-Ala river. There the madman Abulu stops them with a prophecy: Ikenna, the eldest, will be killed by a fisherman — by a brother. The prophecy enters the family like a fever, and Obioma tells what it costs in the cadences of folktale and the Bible's Cain and Abel. Written as a tribute to his own brothers, the debut was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and won the FT/Oppenheimer Emerging Voices Award and the NAACP Image Award for a debut author.
Author: Chigozie Obioma · Original publisher: ONE, Pushkin Press (London), 2015