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'Soyinka's greatest novel ... No one else can write such a book' - Ben Okri
'A lion of African literature' - Financial Times
'Chronicles is many things at once: a caustic political satire, a murder mystery, a conspiracy story and a deeply felt lament for the spirit of a nation' - Juan Gabriel Vasquez, New York Times
A FINANCIAL TIMES AND SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR
To Doctor Menka's horror, some cunning entrepreneur has decided to sell body parts from his hospital for use in ritualistic practices. Already at the end of his tether from the horrors he routinely sees in surgery, he shares this latest development with his oldest college friend, bon viveur, star engineer and Yoruba royal, Duyole Pitan-Payne, who has never before met a puzzle he couldn't solve. Neither realise how close the enemy is, nor how powerful.
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is at once a savagely witty whodunit, a scathing indictment of Nigeria's political elite, and a provocative call to arms from one of the country's most relentless political activists and an international literary giant.
'A high-jinks state-of-the-nation novel' - Chibundu Onuzo
'Chronicles is a good model for what the political novel should be: fearless, disdaining formal constraints, sparing no one' – Guardian
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Wole Soyinka - playwright, novelist, poet and polemical essayist - was born in Nigeria in 1934. Educated there and at Leeds University, he worked in the British theatre before returning to West Africa in 1960. In 1986 he became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His plays include The Jero Plays (1960, 1966), The Road (1965), The Lion and the Jewel (1966), Madmen and Specialists (1971), Death and the King's Horseman (1975), A Play with Giants (1984), A Scourge of Hyacinths (1991) and From Zia, With Love (1992). His novels include The Interpreters (1973) and Season of Anomy (1980). His collections of poetry include Idanre (1967), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) - composed during a period of over two years in prison without trial, most of it in solitary confinement - and Mandela's Earth (1990). In 1988, his collection of essays on literature and culture, Art, Dialogue and Outrage was published. He has also written three autobiographical volumes Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981), Ìsarà: A Voyage Around Essay (1989) and Ibadan (1994). Since 2007 he has been Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. |
| Category: | Contemporary Fiction |
| ISBN: | 9781526638250 |
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing PLC |
| On sale: | October 2022 |
| Format: | Paperback |
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