Arrows of Rain
Okey Ndibe
ISBN: 9781641293013
Published: October, 2020
Pricing
Paperback $16.00
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Description
In Nigerian novelist and journalist Okey Ndibe's powerful debut novel, living to tell the tale is not enough—you must also tell it. Twenty years after its original publication, and now with a new Foreword by the author, Arrows of Rain remains a vital exploration of the importance of story in opposition to corruption and the...
In Nigerian novelist and journalist Okey Ndibe’s powerful debut novel, living to tell the tale is not enough—you must also tell it. Twenty years after its original publication, and now with a new Foreword by the author, Arrows of Rain remains a vital exploration of the importance of story in opposition to corruption and the steep cost of speaking truth to power.
“A story that must be told never forgives silence.”
In the country of Madia (based in part on Ndibe’s native Nigeria) a young sex worker runs into the sea and drowns. The last man who spoke to her, the “madman” Bukuru, is asked to account for her last moments. When his testimony implicates the Madian armed forces, Bukuru is arrested and charged with her death. At the first day of trial, Bukuru, acting as his own attorney, counters these charges with allegations of his own, speaking not only of government complicity in a series of violent assaults and killings, but telling the court that the president of Madia himself is guilty of rape and murder. The incident is hushed up, and Bukuru is sent back to prison, where he will likely meet his end. But a young journalist manages to visit him, and together they journey through decades of history that illuminate Bukuru’s life, and that of the entire nation.
A brave and powerful work of fiction, Arrows of Rain continues to resonate as a necessary morality tale and a brilliant dramatization of the complex factors behind the near-collapse of a nation from one of the most exciting novelists writing today.
Media
“Highly evocative. ”
—Wole Soyinka
“Ndibe is a gifted writer and an adept storyteller, who clearly exults in the telling. ”
—Essence Magazine
“Arrows of Rain is a brooding and powerful first novel from Nigerian Okey Ndibe ... a gritty political thriller with real emotional depth which poses vital questions about our responsibility to bear witness; to be the custodian of ‘stories which must be told.’ ”
—The New Internationalist
“What do you do, Ndibe asks, when you are faced with injustice and total corruption? When to speak will very likely mean your end? A Kafkaesque, imaginative novel of great necessity and power. ”
–Kirkus on Arrows of Rain
“This novel does what great novels are supposed to do. It creates a new world that, bigger than ours, closer than ours, more intense than ours, brings us back to where we live with a better understanding of just what our lives mean to those we will never see, touch or know. ”
–Rick Kleffel, KQED Public Radio on Arrows of Rain
“Smart and often deftly written, a parable of power and the humanity it strips away ... Arrows of Rain remains a novel of resistance — if not political resistance, exactly, then resistance at the level of the soul. ”
–David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times on Arrows of Rain
“ARROWS OF RAIN is Greek Tragedy.... It serves as a powerful reminder that the imprint of history – its machinations and cultural usurpations, its elevations and denigrations – is not merely on the subsequent chronicle, but on subsequent individual souls as well. ”