An NPR Best Book of 2019 A New York Times, Washington Post, Telegraph, and BBC’s most anticipated book of August 2019 One of Time’s 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer A stunning debut novel, from Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Tope Folarin about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uncomfortable assimilation to American life. Living in small-town … in Utah and their uncomfortable assimilation to American life.
Living in small-town Utah has always been an uneasy fit for Tunde Akinola’s family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he can’t escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black won’t come off. As he struggles to fit in and find his place in the world, he finds little solace from his parents who are grappling with their own issues.
Tunde’s father, ever the optimist, works tirelessly chasing his American dream while his wife, lonely in Utah without family and friends, sinks deeper into schizophrenia. Then one otherwise-ordinary morning, Tunde’s mother wakes him with a hug, bundles him and his baby brother into the car, and takes them away from the only home they’ve ever known.
But running away doesn’t bring her, or her children, any relief from the demons that plague her; once Tunde’s father tracks them down, she flees to Nigeria, and Tunde never feels at home again. He spends the rest of his childhood and young adulthood searching for connection–to the wary stepmother and stepbrothers he gains when his father remarries; to the Utah residents who mock his father’s accent; to evangelical religion; to his Texas middle school’s crowd of African-Americans; to the fraternity brothers of his historically black college. In so doing, he discovers something that sends him on a journey away from everything he has known.
Sweeping, stirring, and perspective-shifting, A Particular Kind of Black Man is a beautiful and poignant exploration of the meaning of memory, manhood, home, and identity as seen through the eyes of a first-generation Nigerian-American.
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Tope Folarin’s writing is smart, spry, tender, funny and inventive, much like the unforgettable main character of A Particular Kind of Black Man himself. Through this narrative of one young man’s childhood and adolescence, Folarin urges us to think about belonging, family, memory and the very act of storytelling anew. An energetic, accomplished debut.
Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man stopped me dead in my tracks and consumed my day in a helpless trance. One feels as if someone else’s mirror has appeared, and the longer one stares into it, the more something reflected becomes…oneself. A radical act.
Hands down, and by a mile my favorite of 2019 so far. Tope Folarin is a revelation. I started by listening, then bought the print version. Listened, then read, then listened as I read. EXCELLENT narrator, EXCELLENT book. Highly recommended.
The protagonist, Tunde, is first generation American born to Nigerian parents. But his are not the overachieving, super-successful Nigerian parents of our stereotypes. No doubt they are ambitious strivers who emphasize education, and have come to America to fulfill their wildest dreams, but mental illness derails Tunde’s parents’ plans, fracture their family and send him, his brother and father into a nomadlike existence for a time. Unequipped to help his sons deal with their mother’s absence, and to make a family without a wife, Tunde’s father tries to reconstruct the nuclear family dream by bringing a new wife from Nigeria, with her own two boys. Together, for a time they make a patchwork quilt of four boys, and a mother and father who never quite fit together as seamlessly as Tunde’s father intended. Tunde is painfully aware that his “new mother” does not love him as his own mother did, and misses her love, however imperfect, and even violent it became as she spiraled deeper into her illness.
Throughout it all, haunted by his mother’s absence Tunde grows up feeling unmoored. He is at once too African, and not African enough; too American, and not American enough. Even his brother seems to assimilate more easily and leave him behind. And for a time, this duality and indecision about who he is (American? African?) contributes to Tunde wondering whether he has inherited his mother’s disease. The reality of his life is occasionally so difficult or unsatisfactory that he invents new realities, and for a time struggles to distinguish one from the other. His journey from an insecure boy seeking a mother’s love and a place in the world to a hyper-competent man who still lacks the ability to completely connect with his emotional self was so engaging I devoured it in a matter of hours.
It’s a short book but packs in so much about the Black immigrant experience in America, that it was a wondrous reading experience. I smiled in recognition at Tunde’s realization at differences between home culture and that of the society in which his family had made their home; felt the pain of his alienation from people who might look just like him but see him as ‘other’, and finally, I experienced the triumph of him beginning–after much discomfort and struggle–to carve out a comfortable identity for himself. I love this book. I’m sure I will visit it again, and again.
A Particular Kind of Black Man is an audacious debut, a book that is many things at once: a profound immigration narrative, a moving coming of age story, and an appraisal and defense of the novel as an essential 21st-century art form. The structure—fluid, slippery, a suspended chord in search of resolution–echoes the journey of the protagonist, and, indeed, of America. In these brilliant, searing, heartbreaking and hopeful pages, Tope Folarin has given us a novel that many of us will revisit for years to come.
Arresting and insightful, Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man is one of those books that refuses to let you go till the very end. Tunde’s world – broken and alive, vivid and painful – bursts from these pages with unforgettable honesty and heart. This is a story about exiles and departures, about the continual search for what has been in front of us all along. A gripping, achingly beautiful debut.
A young man grows up distanced from family, country and his beloved mother; so begins the attrition of his sense of self. In this emotionally evocative and immensely moving story, Tope Folarin shows how the need to belong lives first in the heart. By combining the immigrant’s tale with a coming-of-age story Folarin has brought new power to both narratives. He is a writer of talent and great promise.
From the breathless first sentence, to the devastating last, this is a particularly mesmerizing kind of novel.
Tope Folarin’s debut novel introduces us to Tunde, a thoughtful and thought-provoking narrator, recalling the story of his life—and the search for his identity—even as these goals are distorted by his perhaps faulty memory and troubled psyche. The prose reads like butter, a smooth, pleasant, satisfying experience from first page to last. The story is reflective without sentiment, and intelligent without succumbing to the academic. All in all, this is a beautiful book, and I hope it finds wide readerships when it’s officially released in August.