Chuma Nwokolo’s The Extinction of Menai is on the PublishersWeekly.com top 10 fiction books for 2018. The Nigerian author’s novel was published by Ohio University Press.
Publishers Weekly is a United States based weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, “The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling”.
One of the highlights from the publication is its annual “best books” where they give their best of the calendar year. The books are categorised in the usual genre’s of fiction, nonfiction, mystery, poetry, science fiction, young adult and more.
This year, Chuma Nwokolo’s The Extinction of Menai is the only book by an African to make the coveted list. The book published by Ohio University Press is described thus;
In 1990, a Nigerian tribe called the Menai are subjected to drug tests by a pharmaceutical company, resulting in the deaths of thousands—by 2005, only a few dozen Menai remain. Nwokolo’s novel features a thrilling, madcap story about twins separated at birth discovering their double lives (unbeknownst even to themselves) and conveys the poignant journey of the Menai spiritual leader searching for the tribe’s ancestral Saharan homeland.
Previous books by Nwokolo are The Extortionist (1983), Dangerous Inheritance (1988), African Tales at Jailpoint (1999), Diaries of a Dead African (2003), One More Tale for the Road (2003), Memories of Stone (poetry, 2006), The Ghost of Sani Abacha (2012), How to Spell Naija in 100 Short Stories (2013), and The Final Testament of a Minor God (poetry, 2014).
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