Read an excerpt from The Fishermen, the debut novel of Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma that is going places.
The Fishermen, which was published in April, has been longlisted for the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Edinburgh Festival First Book Award.
Binyavanga Wainaina recently told Books LIVE he thinks Obioma is “something quite serious”, adding: “I’m on page 10 and already I have goosebumps.”
Read an excerpt from the first chapter of The Fishermen:
We were fishermen:
My brothers and I became fishermen in January of 1996 after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives. His employer, the Central Bank of Nigeria, had transferred him to a branch of the bank in Yola—a town in the north that was a camel distance of more than one thousand kilometres away—in the first week of November of the previous year. I remember the night Father returned home with his transfer letter; it was on a Friday. From that Friday through that Saturday, Father and Mother held whispering consultations like shrine priests. By Sunday morning, Mother emerged a different being. She’d acquired the gait of a wet mouse, averting her eyes as she went about the house. She did not go to church that day, but stayed home and washed and ironed a stack of Father’s clothes, wearing an impenetrable gloom on her face. Neither of them said a word to my brothers and me, and we did not ask. My brothers—Ikenna, Boja, Obembe—and I had come to understand that when the two ventricles of our home—our father and our mother—held silence as the fishermen the ventricles of the heart retain blood, we could flood the house if we poked them. So, at times like these, we avoided the television in the eight-columned shelf in our sitting room. We sat in our rooms, studying or feigning to study, anxious but not asking questions. While there, we stuck out our antennae to gather whatever we could of the situation.
- Keep reading: BBC (PDF)
Book details
- The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma
EAN: 9780992918248
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Image of the author courtesy Pontas Agency