by Teju Cole
First published 2023
Tunde teaches photography at a prestigious New England college, but his mind constantly travels between his West African childhood and his American present. During a weekend antique shopping trip, he confronts the brutal colonial history embedded in the landscape around him. Evening walks bring unwelcome encounters with casual bigotry. His marriage, though loving, carries unexplained strains that neither he nor his wife can fully articulate. As Tunde moves through his daily life, a chorus of voices emerges from the bustling city that surrounds him. Each moment becomes a lens through which entire histories come into focus. His personal experiences refract outward to illuminate broader truths about displacement, belonging, and the weight of the past. The novel examines how we measure and remember time, how individual lives contain multitudes of other stories.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, african-literature, contemporary
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, unreliable-narrator
Setting: New England, West Africa
Period: 21st Century
239 pages · Paperback · Faber & Faber
Content warnings: colonialism