Chigozie Obioma is the Nigerian author of the novels The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for their unique, folkloric tales of Nigerian life in decades past. Like them, his 2024 novel The Road to the Country is “tinged with fable and prophecy”. It’s set in the brutal Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1960, fought between Nigeria and the Republic of Biafra, a secessionist state which had declared its independence. This epic story of “a young man seeking redemption in a country on fire” is about a shy Lagos student whose brother disappears during the war. He sets out to find him and make right something that happened in the past. We asked Obioma about the work.
Why did you undertake this story; how did it reveal itself?
I knew I wanted to write this book from very early on. In 1993, during a visit to my parents’ eastern village for the first time, I saw a lot of people with physical deformities of all sorts. I was surprised by this, having grown up in a city where I hardly saw anything of that sort. I asked my mother why these people were like this and she said to me, simply: “The war”. The village is in the former Biafran territory.
