Born on a Tuesday
Price range: ₦7,000.00 through ₦10,000.00
WINNER – BETTY TRASK AWARD 2017
SHORTLISTED – NLNG NIGERIA PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2016
SHORTLISTED – REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE 2016
LONGLISTED – ETISALAT PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2016
This novel explores life, love, friendship, loss and the effects of extremist politics and religion on everyday life in Northern Nigeria.
Dantala lives in Bayan Layi, Nigeria and studies in a Sufi Quranic school. By chance he meets gang leader Banda, a nominal Muslim. Dantala is thrust into a world with fluid rules and casual violence. In the aftermath of presidential elections he runs away and ends up living in a Salafi mosque. Slowly and through the hurdles of adolescence, he embraces Salafism as preached by his new benefactor, Sheikh Jamal. Dantala falls in love with Sheikh’s daughter, Aisha, and tries to court her within the acceptable limits of a conservative setting. All the while, Sheikh struggles to deal with growing jihadist extremism within his own ranks.
Elnathan John is a lawyer, novelist and satirist. His short stories have been shortlisted twice for the Caine Prize for African Writing, in 2013 and 2015. His novel, Born on a Tuesday won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature. It has been translated into German and French and won the 2019 Le Prix Littéraire Les Afriques . His book — a satire collection Be(com)ing Nigerian, A Guide was published by Cassava Republic Press in 2019 and his graphic novel, On Ajayi Crowther Street, in November 2019. Elnathan lives in Berlin and is a 2019 recipient of the Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature.
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