Synopses & Reviews
Uwem Akpan's first published short story, "An Ex-mas Feast," appeared in
The New Yorker's Debut Fiction issue in 2005. The story's portrait of a family living together in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya, and their attempts to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday, gives a matter-of-fact reality to the most extreme circumstances — and signaled the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer.
"My Parents' Bedroom" is a Rwandan girl's account of her family's struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. In "Fat-tening for Gabon," a brother and sister cope with their uncle's attempt to sell them into slavery. "Luxurious Hearses" creates a microcosm of Africa within a busload of refugees and introduces us to a Muslim boy who summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride through Nigeria. "What Language Is That?" reveals the emotional toll of the Christian-Muslim conflict in Ethiopia through the eyes of childhood friends.
Every story is a testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing situations our planet can offer.
Review
"[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
Review
"Awe is the only appropriate response to Uwem Akpan's stunning debut...a collection of five stories so ravishing and sad that I regret ever wasting superlatives on fiction that was merely very good. (Grade: A)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"Haunting prose. Unrelenting horror. An almost unreadable must-read." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Review
"All the promise and heartbreak of Africa today are brilliantly illuminated in this debut collection." Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Review
"Uwem Akpan's brilliant Say You're One of Them proves that great fiction often can reveal more truth than a whole shelf of memoirs and histories....Akpan creates an extraordinary portrait of modern Africa with his debut short-story collection." USA Today
Review
"Akpan has demonstrated the true talent of a fiction writer: He is a gifted storyteller capable of bringing to life myriad characters and points of view....[T]he result is admirable, artistically as well as morally." The Christian Science Monitor
Review
"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." Alan Cheuse, The Chicago Tribune
Review
"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
Synopsis
From a portrait of a family living together in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya to a Rwandan girl's account of her family's struggles to maintain normalcy amid unspeakable horrors, each of the short stories in this collection is a testament to the wisdom and resilience of children.
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.