The Fishermen
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 3, 2017 7:41 PM | Last Updated: March 9, 2017
Chigozie Obioma
In a Nigerian town in the mid 1990s, four brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family. Told from the point of view of nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990s Nigeria, in the small town of Akure.
When their strict father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the ominous, forbidden nearby river, they meet a dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact — both tragic and redemptive — will transcend the lives and imaginations of its characters and its readers.
Dazzling and viscerally powerful,The Fishermen never leaves Akure, but the story it tells has enormous universal appeal. Seen through the prism of one family's destiny, this is an essential novel about Africa with all of its contradictions — economic, political, and religious — and the epic beauty of its own culture. (From Little, Brown and Company)
From the book
We were fishermen:
My brothers and I became fishermen in January of 1996 after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives. His employer, the Central Bank of Nigeria, had transferred him to a branch of the bank in Yola — a town in the north that was a camel distance of more than one thousand kilometres away — in the first week of November of the previous year. I remember the night Father returned home with his transfer letter; it was on a Friday. From that Friday through that Saturday, Father and Mother held whispering consultations like shrine priests. By Sunday morning, Mother emerged a different being. She'd acquired the gait of a wet mouse, averting her eyes as she went about the house. She did not go to church that day, but stayed home and washed and ironed a stack of Father's clothes, wearing an impenetrable gloom on her face. Neither of them said a word to my brothers and me, and we did not ask.
From The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma ©2015. Published by Little, Brown and Company.