The Fishermen
Books | Fiction / Literary
4
(74)
Chigozie Obioma
In this striking novel about an unforgettable childhood, four Nigerian brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family Told by nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of a childhood in Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his absence to skip school and go fishing. At the forbidden nearby river, they meet a 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 the book's characters and readers. Dazzling and viscerally powerful, The Fisherman is an essential novel about Africa, seen through the prism of one family's destiny.
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Author
Chigozie Obioma
Pages
304
Publisher
Little, Brown
Published Date
2015-04-14
ISBN
0316338362 9780316338363
Ratings
Google: 5
Community ReviewsSee all
"As an Igbo girl, this book is one of my favorites. The Fishermen is one of those novels that is very easy to get into. The first few chapters fly by as you’re immersed is 1980s Nigeria. I feel it was especially easy for me as a gen z Nigerian girl as I used this time frame to understand the climate of which my parents grew up in.<br/>I had no idea what to expect from this novel when I first started reading, and I think this really helped me to further love the novel. I suggest to new readers to skip the synopsis in the back of the novel, as I feel like it gives away too many details of the book, and can be a bit of a spoiler. One thing I can see about this book is that it is not predictable in the slightest, which is a breath of fresh air. Nothing that I thought would happen did happen, and all the death and tragedies that occur occurred so abruptly that mimicked the abruptness of tragedies in real life. The quickness at which this family fell apart really mirrored the quickness in which normal people’s family can fall apart it was so realistic in that sense which was almost bone-chilling at some points. <br/><br/>Chigozie Obioma does a great job of describing, I guess would be the main antagonist of the novel Abulu, the madman. They were really some points in this book, where I found it very hard to see this man as human, to see his humanity, because of the way Obioma writes his character. Even in the scene where Benjamin and Obembe killed Abulu I did not have the same reaction. I want to another protagonist killing an antagonist. It felt justified in the sense that even though I knew it was wrong, because the author had done such a good job characterizing Abulu as really a wretched man.<br/><br/>I think everyone should read this novel."
Adaugo
"Recommended by Melanie"
Belinda Roberts
