Astonishing first novel…a remarkable, mythic book.

In his exploration of the mysterious and the murderous, of the terrors that can take hold of the human mind, of the colors of life in Africa, with its vibrant fabrics and its trees laden with fruit, and most of all in his ability to create dramatic tension in this most human of African stories, ­Chigozie Obioma truly is the heir to ­Chinua Achebe.

The Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma’s debut novel, is an incredibly assured piece of writing. It is a novel of modern Nigeria still under the thrall of superstition, and is marked by two ­qualities: the consistent fineness of its prose and its deft handling of narratorial perspective.

Darkly mythic…a kind of African Cormac McCarthy, committed to a stark vision of life in which our pretensions to civilization are forever held up and exposed as skin deep: that what really runs us is deeper down, in the blood.

A classic… [Obioma’s] language flares and gleams poetically and his grip on narrative is unfaltering

Nowhere is the mythic quality of The Fishermen felt more than in its… vivid images, often drawn from the natural world, through which its narrator recalls his childhood

Obioma, the heir to Chinua Achebe, is a good writer whose work has a deeply felt authenticity, combined with old-fashioned storytelling.

An excellent debut…Chigozie Obioma writes with sophistication and inventiveness; he’s obviously deeply in love with the English language, and it shows. This is a dark and beautiful book by a writer with seemingly endless promise.

Seamlessly interweaving the everyday and the elemental, Obioma’s strange, imaginative debut—the translation rights to which have been sold in 12 countries—probes the nature of belief and the power of family bonds…Obioma excels at juxtaposing sharp observation, rich images of the natural world, and motifs from biblical and tribal lore; his novel succeeds as a convincing modern narrative and as a majestic reimagining of timeless folklore.