The One Read App offering for this month, Nnamdi Ehirim’s Prince of Monkeys, was revealed on October 6, 2020.
One Read is a mobile application, brought to you by Nigeria’s Sterling Bank and Ouida Books, aimed at promoting writers, publishers, and other players in the African book industry to create a community of readers. Readers have been getting access to some of the most stunning work today like Travellers by Helon Habila in June, We, The Scarred by Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Not My Time to Die by Yolande Mukagasana, and Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gappah.
The selected book for the app for October is the debut novel by Nigerian writer Nnamdi Ehirim Prince of Monkeys, The book’s blurb goes thus;
Growing up in middle-class Lagos, Nigeria during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ihechi forms a band of close friends discovering Lagos together as teenagers with differing opinions of everything from film to football, Fela Kuti to spirituality, sex to politics. They remain close-knit until tragedy unfolds during an anti-government riot.
Exiled from Lagos by his concerned mother, Ihechi moves in with his uncle’s family, where he struggles to find himself outside his former circle of friends. Ihechi eventually finds success by leveraging his connection with a notorious prostitution linchpin and political heavyweight, earning favor among the ruling elite.
But just as Ihechi is about to make his final ascent into the elite political class, he reunites with his childhood friends and experiences a crisis of conscience that forces him to question his world, his motives, and whom he should become. Nnamdi Ehirim’s debut novel, Prince of Monkeys, is a lyrical, meditative observation of Nigerian life, religion, and politics at the end of the twentieth century.
Click here to download the One Read App on Google Play Store.
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