The Wizard of the Crow
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Commencing in ‘our times’ and set in the ‘Free Republic of Aburiria’, the novel dramatises with corrosive humour and keenness of observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburirian people. Fashioning the stories of the powerful and the ordinary into a dazzling mosaic, Ngugi reveals humanity in all its ceaselessly surprising complexity.
Informed by richly enigmatic traditional African storytelling, Wizard of the Crow is a masterpiece, the crowning achievement in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s career thus far.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Ngugi
wa Thiong’o
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s new novel is the culmination of a life-time’s work in the Kikuyu language. It has all the elements of Ngugi’s powerful, analytical, politically- conscious fiction, but with an additional epic storytelling quality. This is Africa, exploited but seething with creative life.
This big novel presents an impressive and almost all-embracing parabola of human, political, cultural and etc. condition in present-day Africa in an absolutely original and subtle manner. The African analogue of the Latin American “magic realism”, deeply enrooted in African soil (literary and metaphorically) and combining
African mentality and mythology with richness and at the same time dryness of contemporary style. The novel is doomed to become modern classic
It is a vivid, compelling and highly amusing satire about the reign of an African despot.
A great book (by one of Africa’s greatest writers) that vividly captures contemporary life in the era of globalisation.