Publication Date audio 12/11/21 Audio time 15hrs 49 mins Book 416 Pages
I would like to thank the author, publishers and Netgalley for allowing me to pick this book to read and review. I always leave honest reviews.
Synopsis
From a suspiciously cheap Hell's Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship Ekong Udousoro is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime: to learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicenter. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly--callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile neighbors, and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food.
Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong's people were a minority of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekong's life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. The great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collective antagonism toward the "other" consumes Ekong's daily life. Yet in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese and Latino and African American, and in bonding with his true allies at work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there is still hope in sharing our stories.
Akpan's prose melds humor, tenderness, and pain to explore the myriad ways that tribalisms define life everywhere, from the villages of Nigeria to the villages within New York City. New York, My Village is a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the life-sustaining power of community across borders and across boroughs.
About the Author
Uwem Akpan's fiction and autobiographical pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, the Nigerian Guardian, O, The Oprah Magazine, and more. His collection of stories, Say You're One of Them, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Africa Region), the PEN Open Book Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was the 2009 Oprah Book Club selection. He is from Ikot Akpan Eda in the Niger Delta in Nigeria and lives in Gainesville, Florida.
My Review
I enjoyed this book and its a wonderful story about a man moving from Africa to New York to edit a book about his culture. I liked the book because not only was I learning about history and culture but, I was also intrigued by how people where treated. It was full of shocking issues from the difficulties getting a visa, the subletting of apartments leading to some awful conditions including his fight with bedbugs. Yes some scary stuff happening in this book. I listened to the audiobook and loved the narrator he was so nice to listen to and really brought the book to life. Emphasising how shocking life could be for immigrants. I also loved the humorous tone throughout the book. Although I really loved the story I found it rather long winded at times as the audiobook is 15 hours long. I also found my self shouting at the book hoover up the bed bugs then lol. Many thanks to the author and publishers for bringing this rather interesting and shock book to life.
Where you can buy this book
Amazon US Kindle $13.27 Available on Audible Hardcover $7.67 Paperback $18.95
B&N Hardcover 23.49 Paperback $18.95 Nook $19.99
Amazon UK Hardcover £20.66 Paperback £14.01
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HAPPY READING