Synopses & Reviews
Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.
A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family's struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle's attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees - a microcosm of today's Africa - a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria. Through the eyes of childhood friends the emotional toll of religious conflict in Ethiopia becomes viscerally clear.
Uwem Akpan's debut signals the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer who gives a matter-of-fact reality to the most extreme circumstances in stories that are nothing short of transcendent.
Review
"Haunting prose. Unrelenting horror. An almost unreadable must-read." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Review
"[A] startling debut collection....[Akpan] fuses a knowledge of African poverty and strife with a conspicuously literary approach to storytelling, filtering tales of horror through the wide eyes of the young." Janet Maslin, New York Times
Review
"All the promise and heartbreak of Africa today are brilliantly illuminated in this debut collection." Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Review
"African writer and Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan depicts the plight of African children with the kind of restraint only possible when an author fully inhabits his characters — he manages to be empathetic without being condescending." The Village Voice
About the Author
Uwem Akpan was born in Ikot Akpan Eda in the Niger Delta in Nigeria. Uwem’s short stories and autobiographical pieces have appeared in the special editions of The New Yorker, the Oprah magazine, Hekima Review, the Nigerian Guardian, America, etc.
His first book, Say You’re One of Them, was published in 2008 by Little, Brown, after a protracted auction. It made the “Best of the Year” list at People magazine, Wall Street Journal, and other places. The New York Times made it the Editor’s Choice, and Entertainment Weekly listed it at # 27 in their Best of the Decade. Say You’re One of Them won the Commonwealth Prize (Africa Region), the Open Book Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. The collection of short stories was the 2009 Oprah Book Club selection. A New York Times and Wall Street Journal #1 bestseller, it has been translated into 12 languages.
His second book and first novel, New York, My Village, will be published in Nov 2021 by WW Norton. In this immigrant story, Uwem writes about NYC with the same promise and pain we saw in his African cities of Say You’re One of Them. “New York City has always mystified me since I first spent two weeks in the Bronx in 1993,” he says. “It was only when I lived in Manhattan in 2013 that I began to understand the metro system, to visit the different neighborhoods, to enjoy the endless ethnic dishes. It didn’t also take long before I discovered the city’s crazy underbelly.”
Uwem teaches in the University of Florida’s MFA Program.