Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize
A dazzling, genre-defying novel in verse from the author Delia Owens
says "tackles the absurdities, injustices, and corruption of a
continent"
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's novels and memoirs have received glowing praise from
the likes of President Barack Obama, the New Yorker, the New York
Times Book Review, The Guardian, and NPR; he has been a finalist for
the Man International Booker Prize and is annually tipped to win the
Nobel Prize for Literature; and his books have sold tens of thousands of
copies around the world.
In his first attempt at the epic form, Ngũgĩ tells the story of the
founding of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya, from a strongly feminist
perspective. A verse narrative, blending folklore, mythology, adventure,
and allegory, The Perfect Nine chronicles the efforts the Gĩkũyũ
founders make to find partners for their ten beautiful daughters--called
"The Perfect Nine" --and the challenges they set for the 99 suitors who
seek their hands in marriage. The epic has all the elements of
adventure, with suspense, danger, humor, and sacrifice.
Ngũgĩ's epic is a quest for the beautiful as an ideal of living, as the
motive force behind migrations of African peoples. He notes, "The epic
came to me one night as a revelation of ideals of quest, courage,
perseverance, unity, family; and the sense of the divine, in human
struggles with nature and nurture."
