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Published Apr 2024
224 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Paperback Original.
Publication Information
A searing, unflinching collection of stories set in Nigeria that explores themes of community expectations, familial strife, and the struggle for survival.
A teenage girl from a poor family is dazzled by her rich, vivacious friend, but as the friend's behavior grows unstable and dangerous, she must decide whether to cover for her or risk telling the truth to get her the help she needs. A young woman and her mother bask in the envy of their neighbors when the woman receives an offer of marriage from the family of a doctor living in Belgium—though when the offer fails to materialize, that envy threatens to turn vicious, pitting them both against their community. And a lonely daughter finds herself wandering a village in eastern Nigeria in an ill-fated quest, struggling to come to terms with her mother's mental illness.
In ten vivid, evocative stories set in contemporary Nigeria, Uche Okonkwo's A Kind of Madness unravels the tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, best friends, siblings, and more, marking the arrival of an extraordinary new talent in fiction and inviting us all to consider the question: why is it that the people and places we hold closest are so often the ones that drive us to madness?
"Okonkwo has a Chekhovian eye for the tangle of internal motivations and assumptions that steer her characters... .Readers will be eager for more of Okonkwo's artful writing."
―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
""Surprising, illuminating, and deeply human." —Booklist
"This debut short-story collection features 10 stories set in present-day Nigeria, all concerned with madness―both the literal madness of mental illness as well as the unruliness of outsize emotions like envy, shame, and desire."
―Oprah Daily
"Uche Okonkwo's voice is absorbing. I was immersed in the familiar world of these tender, playfully haunting, darkly funny stories. Okonkwo is a writer to watch."
―Chinelo Okparanta, author of Harry Sylvester Bird
"Touched my heart. Uche Okonkwo's stories are among the very best."
―Sidik Fofana, author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs
"To read Uche Okonkwo's A Kind of Madness is to have an experience: of complex characters grappling with life's many troubles, of a robust culture, of history, of the battle between the domestic and the public, and all the big themes of life woven together. Like Jhumpa Lahiri, Okonkwo's mastery of the form is as rich as some of the short story's best practitioners and deserves every recognition it is sure to get."
―Chigozie Obioma, author of An Orchestra of Minorities
This information about A Kind of Madness 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.
Uche Okonkwo's stories have been published in A Public Space, One Story, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares,The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, and Lagos Noir, among others. A former Bernard O'Keefe Scholar at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and resident at Art Omi, she is a recipient of the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and a Steinbeck Fellowship. Okonkwo grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and is currently pursuing a creative writing PhD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
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