fbpx

JBP full logo black

icon ecomm1 icon newsletter1 icon fb1 icon twitter1 icon instagram1

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth


Wole Soyinka


One of the best there is today, a poet and a thinker, who knows both how the world works and how the world should work - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A towering figure in world literature, Wole Soyinka aims directly at the corridors of power as he warns against corruption both of high office and of the soul, with a dazzling lightness of touch and gleeful irreverence.

Much 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.

 

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:  9781526638236
Publisher:  Bloomsbury Publishing
On sale:  October 2021
Format:  Paperback
eBook ISBN 
BUY ONLINE:
Takealot reseller loot
EB logo Protea
  Balakudu 
  Raru