About this ebook
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 MAN BOOKER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD
In a small town in western Nigeria, four young brothers – the youngest is nine, the oldest fifteen – use their strict father’s absence from home to go fishing at a forbidden local river.
They encounter a dangerous local madman who predicts that the oldest brother will be killed by another. This prophecy breaks their strong bond, and unleashes a tragic chain of events of almost mythic proportions.
Passionate and bold, The Fishermen is a breathtakingly beautiful novel, firmly rooted in the best of African storytelling.
With this powerful debut, Chigozie Obioma emerges as one of the most original new voices in world literature.
PRAISE FOR CHIGOZIE OBOMA
‘It's like being in a Zola or Theodore Dreiser novel … The Fishermen is an elegy to lost promise … and yet it remains hopeful about the redemptive possibilities of a new generation’ The Guardian
‘[S]tructurally complex … a novel of uncommon grace.’ The Saturday Age
About the author
Chigozie Obioma was born in 1986 in Akure, Nigeria. A multiple winner of Hopwood Awards for fiction and poetry, his short stories have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and Transition. He has lived in Nigeria, Cyprus, and Turkey, and currently resides in the United States, where he recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing and is now a Fiction Fellow at the University of Michigan. The Fishermen is his first novel.