"What an extraordinary book this is!" –David Haynes

Michael dreams of becoming a writer, a journey that takes him from the village of his birth, to the glittering club and ambition-fueled Nigeria of Nollywood fame, all the way to the cold promise of American exceptionalism. The colonial past ultimately follows him to an elite Virginia university, where Michael soon finds the manicured lawns and staid halls shelter ghosts of their own.

In this twenty-first-century look toward Africa, Michael’s yearning for a place in his own history free of the economic precarity, hypermasculinity, and psychic displacement imposed upon his nation leads him on a quest to reinhabit the story of his family and reclaim the fate of lost friends, while finding his own reflection in their encounters with violence, madness, and the struggle for reinvention.

Nearly seventy years after Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, we meet Michael as he fights for a neo-African identity in the wake of such history. This frank look at the politics, fissures, missed connections and convergences of Black and African identity reads like a fever dream as Michael sifts among the ashes of the lives of his father and the many fathers before him to find that the fires of a people's ruptured past continue to burn.