Arrows of Rain

In Nigerian novelist and journalist Okey Ndibe's highly effective debut novel, residing to inform the story will not be sufficient—you have to additionally inform it. Twenty years after its authentic publication, and now with a new Foreword by the creator, Arrows of Rain stays a significant exploration of the significance of story in opposition to corruption and the steep value of talking fact to energy.
 
“A narrative that have to be instructed by no means forgives silence.”

Within the nation of Madia (based mostly partly on Ndibe’s native Nigeria) a younger intercourse employee runs into the ocean and drowns. The final man who spoke to her, the “madman” Bukuru, is requested to account for her final moments. When his testimony implicates the Madian armed forces, Bukuru is arrested and charged together with her demise. On the first day of trial, Bukuru, appearing as his personal legal professional, counters these costs with allegations of his personal, talking not solely of presidency complicity in a collection of violent assaults and killings, however telling the court docket that the president of Madia himself is responsible of rape and homicide. The incident is hushed up, and Bukuru is shipped again to jail, the place he’ll probably meet his finish. However a younger journalist manages to go to him, and collectively they journey by a long time of historical past that illuminate Bukuru’s life, and that of all the nation.

A courageous and highly effective work of fiction, Arrows of Rain continues to resonate as a mandatory morality story and an excellent dramatization of the complicated components behind the near-collapse of a nation from one of essentially the most thrilling novelists writing at the moment.

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