Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. In this strange tale, a man is summoned back to the African country of his birth, after escaping to America after a short prison sentence. Our unnamed narrator is constantly off balance as he doesn’t recognize anyone and is not entirely sure why he is there. He thinks the servants at the first house he comes to are his relatives, he has to give a distant relative money to build a house that is already built, he listens to people on the buses he takes cross country as they make speeches or ask him questions. He leaves his money in a bank that won’t let him deposit his money in his brother’s name and leaves his passport in the pharmacy that won’t sell him medicine for his high blood pressure. An ex priest makes him wear used clothes. He ex wife is now a servant. This almost dreamlike book flies along as we root for a narrator who seems very much in over his head.

What a strange, challenging gem of a novel. HANGMAN tells the story of an unnamed narrator who journeys to his homeland for reasons that are not initially quite clear. The tone is at times wry, the novel in itself a bit voice-y. The closest corollary I could think of is the Outline trilogy, as here too the narrative unfolds via confession after confession that strangers force onto the narrator. Though I thought about Katie Kitamura's most recent novels, too, as the story feels darker and more consequential than the Cusk trilogy.

I look forward to reading what Binyam writes next.

Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley!