Excerpt from This House Is Not for Sale by E.C. Osondu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

According to Rotate, there were only two kinds of people in this world, those who were for Rotate and those who were against him. He said that there was no way the police would have known where he kept his marijuana cache if someone had not worked as an informant. He said if his enemies were jealous because he was the owner of an ordinary motorcycle, then what were they going to do when he bought the fully air-conditioned Peugeot 504 station wagon that he was going to buy soon. Though Rotate had dropped out of school early in form three in secondary school, he still threw around terms from the various subjects he had studied in school and justified his nefarious trade in marijuana by quoting the law of demand and supply. He said having only one store in the village was the equivalent of creating a monopoly. He said he believed in democracy, which was why he played his gramophone for all, unlike Cash, who only played for his favorites. He said he was planning on expanding his business and bringing democracy to the village. He planned to expand his business and open a full-fledged boutique selling ladies' and children's clothes and would also open a chemist shop that would sell medications. He said he was practicing what he had learned in his business methods class in school.

Cash did his best to reach out to Rotate. He sent a couple of individuals who were close to Rotate, the people who bought marijuana from him. Rotate said to them, "The police told me that the person who told them about me and my business told them to lock me up for good, that he did not want them to ever release me from detention. Think of what would have happened if I was never released. Who else could possibly tell them that?"

Soon after his release, Rotate bought an electric generator and a fridge and began to sell cold drinks. Cash had a gas lamp in his store and this was considered a major boost in a village where darkness descended without warning and was impenetrable and dense. But people also told Rotate that the two records Cash played over and over again were songs in which the musicians talked about enemies. One of the songs had the refrain:

My enemy, you are not my creator
You are not the owner of my destiny
Your hatred of me, and your anger against me will kill you.

We had never seen Grandpa dance, but he always told us that the day when Gramophone got married he would dance and dance. When we asked Grandpa why he did not dance he would respond, If you give me a reason to dance I will dance. Win a scholarship to study in England and I will dance. If you people give me a good reason to dance I will dance. The only person that dances for no reason is the madman down the street, and even the madman has a reason, it is only that we don't know his reason. But the day your uncle gets married, I will dance for the whole world to see.

Excerpted from This House Is Not for Sale by E.C. Osondu. Copyright © 2015 by E.C. Osondu. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.