The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa

A Novel

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Pub Date 18 Apr 2023 | Archive Date 30 Apr 2023
Bloomsbury USA | Bloomsbury Publishing

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Description

The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Finalist
Longlisted for the 2024 Aspen Words Literary Prize
Named a Best of the Year Book by NPR

Crackling with energy and intelligence, this debut is the "
smart, subversive, funny, heartbreaking" (Kamila Shamsie) story of an exceptional teenager coming of age in the shadow of colonialism and communal violence in Nigeria.

Andrew Aziza is an unusually smart fifteen-year-old in Kontagora, Nigeria. He lives with his fiercely protective mother, Gloria, and fantasizes obsessively about white girls—especially blondes. When he's not in church, at school, or hanging about town with his droogs wishing to become one of “Africa’s first superheroes,” he's contemplating the larger questions with his teacher Zahrah and his equally brilliant friend Fatima, a Hausa-Fulani girl who has feelings for him. Together they discuss mathematical theorems, Black power, and what Andy has deemed the Curse of Africa.

Sure enough, the reluctantly nicknamed Andy Africa soon falls hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on: Eileen. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. An unfamiliar man there claims, despite his mother’s denials, to be Andy’s father, and an anti-Christian mob has gathered, headed for the church. In the ensuing havoc and its aftermath, Andy is forced to reckon with his identity and desires and determine how to live on the so-called Cursed Continent.

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa announces a dazzlingly unique literary voice. Crackling with energy, this tragicomic novel provides a stunning lens into contemporary African life, the complicity of the West, and the impossible challenges of growing up in a turbulent world.

The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Finalist
Longlisted for the 2024 Aspen Words Literary Prize
Named a Best of the Year Book by NPR

Crackling with energy and intelligence, this debut is the "
smart...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781635577778
PRICE $28.00 (USD)
PAGES 320

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Average rating from 21 members


Featured Reviews

If you've landed on this review, others have likely already described the book better than I can, all I can add is my own experience with this unique Nigerian coming of age story.
This book is about complex relationships (human/country, mother/son, friend/lover, deceased/survivor, beauty/ugliness, poetry/wreckage, hope/defeat... I could go on), but significantly the struggle between the body and the brain.
I found it to be heartbreaking and hilarious, and very smart. The poetry throughout was never flowery, but always impactful, giving us a glimpse into the heart of our beloved Andy Africa, full of intellectual curiosity, and carrying the burden of his mothers ruin from the very start, without fully comprehending why.
I love a book that teaches me, and I was soon researching foods, anti futurism and massacres. What I found in researching the terms and events of a culture I'm largely ignorant of was compelling, curious and heartbreaking -- just like this unforgettable novel.

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