Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2024
384 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Paperback Original.
Publication Information
A genre-breaking novel from a powerful new African voice
It is 2019, The Year of Return. Ghana is inviting Black diasporans to return and get to know the land of their enslaved ancestors. Elton, Vincent, and Scott arrive from America to explore Ghana's colonial past, and to experience the country's underground queer scene. Their visit and activities are narrated by two very different Ghanians: the exuberant and rebellious Kobby, who is their guide to Accra's privileged and queer circles; and Nana, the voice of tradition and religious principle. Neither is very trustworthy and the tense relationship between them sets the tone for what turns into a gripping, energetically told, and often funny tale of murder reminiscent of the novels of Patricia Highsmith, Graham Greene, Chinua Achebe, and Alain Mabanckou.
"Three American gay men travel to Ghana to pay homage to their enslaved ancestors and explore the country's queer underground scene in the audacious debut from Ghanaian book critic Ben Ben...wildly inventive...The sheer wonder of Ben Ben's narrative design anchors the reader in the immersive maelstrom of voices. The results are propulsive and deliciously irreverent in equal measure." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A cinematic, cutting, and smart debut novel...Ben Ben rejects prevailing colonial narratives with this graphic rock opera of murder, sex, and tourism." —Booklist
"Dark, unsettling, utterly addictive." —African Arguments
"A book that brims with possibilities, contradictions, jokes, puzzles, detours, ambiguities, secrets and metafictional tricks and twists." —The Guardian
This information about No One Dies Yet was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kobby Ben Ben was born in Ghana, where he is a prominent book reviewer and runs the African Book Club and the Ghana Must Read website. His eccentric Instagram book blog, @bookworm_man, has caught the attention of Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo, as well as Maaza Mengiste and Petina Gappah, among others. No One Dies Yet is his first novel.
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