For readers of J. M. Coetzee and
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Every Day Is
for the Thief is Teju Cole’s second novel, following his critically
acclaimed debut, Open City, winner of
the PEN/Hemingway Award, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award,
and named one of the best books of the year by more than twenty publications.
“Fifteen years is a long time to be
away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud.”
A young Nigerian living in New York
City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and
strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a
mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the “yahoo
yahoo” diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet café, longs after
a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a
bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused
of stealing at a local market.
Along the way, the man reconnects
with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the
energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—and slowly begins to
reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the
truth about himself.
In spare, precise prose that sees
humanity everywhere, Every Day Is for the
Thief is a wholly original amalgamation of fiction, memory, art, and travel
writing. Originally published in Nigeria in 2007, this revised and updated
edition is the first time this unique book has been available outside Africa.
You’ve never read a book like Every Day
Is for the Thief because no one writes like Teju Cole.
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