In the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about the tension between destiny and determination.
On a bridge in Nigeria, Chinonso, a young poultry farmer, come across a woman who is about to jump to her death. Horrified, he 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 and the pair fall in love. Her rich family object to the union because he is uneducated, so he sells his possessions to attend a college in Cyprus. But Cyprus disappoints, and Chinonso only seems to be getting further from his dream…In this contemporary twist of Homer's Odyssey, in the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about the tension between destiny and determination.
"This is a story, then, in which the events take place behind a veil, and the intensity of passion is dimmed ... The novel comes alive in those moments when it captures the alienation of foreigners in strange lands ... Obioma is especially good at exposing such instances of casual racism ... It’s a story as old as the epic, but, sadly, an all too modern one." - Esi Edugyan, The New York Times Book Review
Chigozie Obioma was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers in 2015, after the huge impact of his debut novel. The Fisherman won the inaugural Financial Times/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Award for Fiction; the NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work - Debut Author; and the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction [Los Angeles Times Book Prizes]. It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015, as well as for several other prizes in the UK and US.