Synopses & Reviews
Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few readers will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of An Ex-Mas Feast needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.
In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa.
Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent.
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"Haunting prose. Unrelenting horror. An almost unreadable must-read." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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"[A] startling debut collection....[Akpan] fuses a knowledge of African poverty and strife with a conspicuously literary approach to storytelling, filtering tales of horror through the wide eyes of the young." Janet Maslin, New York Times
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"All the promise and heartbreak of Africa today are brilliantly illuminated in this debut collection." Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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"African writer and Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan depicts the plight of African children with the kind of restraint only possible when an author fully inhabits his characters — he manages to be empathetic without being condescending." The Village Voice
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"Awe is the only appropriate response to Uwem Akpan's stunning debut, Say You're One of Them, a collection of five stories so ravishing and sad that I regret ever wasting superlatives on fiction that was merely very good. A."--Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly (EW Pick / Grade A)
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"Uwem Akpan's searing Say You're One of Them captures a ravaged <st1:place w:st="on">Africa through the dry-eyed gaze of children trying to maintain a sense of normalcy amid chaos."--Megan O'Grady, Vogue
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"Akpan wants you to see and feel <st1:place w:st="on">Africa, its glory and its pain. And you do, which makes this an extraordinary book."--Vince Passaro, O Magazine
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"Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit priest, has said he was inspired to write by the 'humor and endurance of the poor,' and his debut story collection...about the gritty lives of African children - speaks to the fearsome, illuminating truth of that impulse."--Lisa Shea, Elle
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"The humor, the endurance, the horrors and grace-Akpan has captured all of it.... The stories are not only amazing and moving, and imbued with a powerful moral courage-they are also surprisingly expert.... Beautifully constructed, stately in a way that offsets their impoverished scenarios. Akpan wants you to see and feel <st1:place w:st="on">Africa, its glory and its pain. And you do, which makes this an extraordinary book."--Vince Passaro, O Magazine
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"Uwem Akpan's stunning short story collection, Say You're One of Them, offers a richer, more nuanced view of Africa than the one we often see on the news....Akpan never lets us forget that the resilient youngsters caught up in these extraordinary circumstances are filled with their own hopes and dreams, even as he assuredly illuminates the harsh realities."--Patrik Henry Bass, Essence
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"In the corrupt, war-ravaged <st1:place w:st="on">Africa of this starkly beautiful debut collection, identity is shifting, never to be trusted...Akpan's people, and the dreamlike horror of the worlds they reveal, are impossible to forget."--Kim Hubbard, People
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"Akpan's brilliance is to present a brutal subject through the bewildered, resolutely chipper voice of children...All five of these stories are electrifying."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"
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"...a tour de force that takes readers into the lives glimpsed in passing on the evening news...These are stories that could have been mired in sentimentality. But the spare, straightforward language - there are few overtly expressed emotions, few adjectives--keeps the narratives moving, unencumbered and the pages turning to the end."--Associated Press
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"brilliant...an extraordinary portrait of modern Africa... [Akpan]... is an important and gifted writer who should be read."--Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
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"This fierce story collection from a Nigerian-born Jesuit priest brings home Africa's most haunting tragedies in tales that take you from the streets of <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Nairobi to the Hutu-Tutsi genocide."--Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel, Minneapolis Star Tribune
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"Akpan combines the strengths of both fiction and journalism - the dramatic potential of the one and the urgency of the other - to create a work of immense power...He is a gifted storyteller capable of bringing to life myriad characters and points of view...the result is admirable, artistically as well as morally."--Adelle Waldman, Christian Science Monitor
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"It is not merely the subject that makes Akpan's...writing so astonishing, translucent, and horrifying all at once; it is his talent with metaphor and imagery, his immersion into character and place....Uwem Akpan has given these children their voices, and for the compassion and art in his stories I am grateful and changed."--Susan Straight, Washington Post Book World (front page review)
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"Say You're One of Them is a book that belongs on every shelf."--Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News
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"Searing...In the end, the most enduring image of these disturbing, beautiful and hopeful stories is that of slipping away. Children disappear into the anonymous blur of the big city or into the darkness of the all-encompassing bush. One can only hope that they survive to live another day and tell another tale."--June Sawyers, San Francisco Chronicle
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"These stories are complex, full of respect for the characters facing depravity, free of sensationalizing or glib judgments. They are dispatches from a journey, Akpan makes clear, which has only begun. It is to their credit that grim as they are-you cannot but hope these tales have a sequel."--John Freeman, Cleveland Plain-Dealer
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"An important literary debut.... Juxtaposed against the clarity and revelation in Akpan's prose-as translucent a style as I've read in a long while--we find subjects that nearly render the mind helpless and throw the heart into a hopeless erratic rhythm out of fear, out of pity, out of the shame of being only a few degrees of separation removed from these monstrous modern circumstances...The reader discovers that no hiding place is good enough with these stories battering at your mind and heart."--Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
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"A stupefyingly talented young Nigerian priest. Akpan never flinches from his difficult subjects--poverty, slavery, mass murder--but he has the largeness of soul to make his vision of the terrible transcendent."--Jeffrey Burke and Craig Seligman, Bloomberg News
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"Any of the six stories in this collection set in <st1:place w:st="on">Africa is enough to break a reader's heart. Two are novella length, including a tour de force, 'Luxurious Hearses,' which takes place on a crowded bus."--From citation by Larry Dark for SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM, a Notable Book finalist for The Story Prize.
Review
"Robin Miles adopts a lovely French-African accent, and if she allows Akpan's beautiful turns of phrase to shine, the underlying tension and fear are also never far from the surface. Miles also narrates "What Language Is That?" This story is partially unaccented, a choice that accentuates the second-person point of view...Dion Graham, in Kenyan-accented English, successfully embodies the family's mother and father, teenaged daughter, and young son"--AudioFile, Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.
A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family's struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle's attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees-a microcosm of today's Africa-a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria. Through the eyes of childhood friends the emotional toll of religious conflict in Ethiopia becomes viscerally clear.
About the Author
Uwem Akpan was born in Ikot Akpan Eda in the Niger Delta in Nigeria. Uwem’s short stories and autobiographical pieces have appeared in the special editions of The New Yorker, the Oprah magazine, Hekima Review, the Nigerian Guardian, America, etc.
His first book, Say You’re One of Them, was published in 2008 by Little, Brown, after a protracted auction. It made the “Best of the Year” list at People magazine, Wall Street Journal, and other places. The New York Times made it the Editor’s Choice, and Entertainment Weekly listed it at # 27 in their Best of the Decade. Say You’re One of Them won the Commonwealth Prize (Africa Region), the Open Book Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. The collection of short stories was the 2009 Oprah Book Club selection. A New York Times and Wall Street Journal #1 bestseller, it has been translated into 12 languages.
His second book and first novel, New York, My Village, will be published in Nov 2021 by WW Norton. In this immigrant story, Uwem writes about NYC with the same promise and pain we saw in his African cities of Say You’re One of Them. “New York City has always mystified me since I first spent two weeks in the Bronx in 1993,” he says. “It was only when I lived in Manhattan in 2013 that I began to understand the metro system, to visit the different neighborhoods, to enjoy the endless ethnic dishes. It didn’t also take long before I discovered the city’s crazy underbelly.”
Uwem teaches in the University of Florida’s MFA Program.