FINALIST FOR THE NIGERIA PRIZE FOR LITERATURE A sweeping heart-racing mystical novel about a
university student in Lagos trying to save his brother and himself amid the chaos of
Nigeria’s civil war—a story of love friendship and personal triumph by the two-time Booker
Prize finalist and “the heir to Chinua Achebe” ( New York Times ) “A wondrous novel.” —Nana
Kwame Adjei-Brenyah author of Chain-Gang All Stars finalist for the National Book Award
“Chigozie Obioma is that rare thing: an original. His world is a mix of the real and the
folkloric and his writing sounds like no one else’s.” —The Wall Street Journal Longlisted
for the Dublin Literary Award the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the New American Voices Award •
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe The Economist and Kirkus Reviews The
first images of the vision are grainy—like something seen through wet glass. But slowly it
clears and there appears the figure of a man. Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s The Road to
the Country is the epic story of a shy bookish student haunted by long-held guilt who must go
to war to free himself. When his younger brother disappears as the country explodes in civil
war Kunle must set out on an impossible rescue mission. Kunle’s search for his brother becomes
a journey of atonement that will see him conscripted into the breakaway Biafran army and forced
to fight a war he hardly understands all while navigating the prophecies of a local Seer he
who marks Kunle as an abami eda—one who will die and return to life. The story of a young man
seeking redemption in a country on fire Chigozie Obioma’s novel is an odyssey of brotherhood
love and unimaginable courage set during one of the most devastating conflicts in the history
of Africa. Intertwining myth and realism into a thrilling inspired and emotionally powerful
novel The Road to the Country is the masterpiece of Chigozie Obioma a writer Salman Rushdie
calls “a major voice” in literature.
