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 her parents object to the union because Chinonso is uneducated, he sells most of his possessions to attend university in Cyprus. Once in Cyprus, Chinonso 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 on Milton, Dante and Homer written 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 was born in 1986 in Akure, Nigeria. He has lived in Nigeria, Cyprus and Turkey and currently resides in the United States, where he teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His first novel, The Fishermen, is winner of the inaugural FT/OppenheimerFunds Emerging Voices Award for Fiction, an NAACP Image Award for Debut Author, and the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (Los Angeles Times Book Prizes); and was a Finalist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Translation rights sold in twenty-six languages and The Fishermen has been adapted into an award-winning stage play. Obioma was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015. His stories and articles have appeared in many publications including The Millions, Virginia Quarterly Review, Guardian and New York Times.
