Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon
Pages: 210
Year: 2012
Category: Contemporary Fiction, Literature
Dimensions: 216 x 140 mm
A drug subculture finally becomes visible… indeed the themes of visibility and invisibility are what animate this haunting tale of loss, craving and abjection.
£30.00
About the author
Sanya Osha is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Naked Light and the
Blind Eye. His fictional work, Dust, Spittle and Wind won the
Association of Nigerian Authors’ prize for prose in 1992. In 2000, he
was a recipient of a Prince Claus Award. He lives in South Africa and is currently a South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) fellow at the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation (IERI), Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria; and research fellow at the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA), Pretoria.
Review
“Sanya Osha is one of the boldest and most distinctive voices in African writing today”.
Toyin Falola, Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters
“His writing is akin to a poetic trance that manages to convey an unexpected and taunting fragile beauty”
Hillary Raphael, author of I Love Lord Buddha
“The novel is blunt, eager to call a spade a spade. Scenes of crimes and of sex come with lucid and elaborate descriptions, a desire to show it as it is. It is also well researched, with all the slangs falling into their appropriate places. Osha is incapable of being unpoetic, and as such the novel itself can boast of being a long poem. Also characteristic of Osha, there is a sustained attempt to philosophise street life, some of it, heavy-handed, standing in the way of the narrative flow. Perhaps the overall importance of this novel is that it offers a window to glimpse at what many commentators on post-Apartheid South Africa have seen as the alarming rate of crimes in the society.”
Sule E. Egya Department of English IBB University, Lapai
“What the novelist inevitably paints as evil is the pointless force of a society and a world that compels ordinary people into extraordinarily complex forms of negation. In a world of slippery values and powerful transitions, we all become complicit. Nothing better illustrates the contradiction than the character Babongile…”
Obi Nwakanma, Vanguard, Nigeria