W&N nets 'future classic' in four-way auction
Weidenfeld & Nicolson has seized God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, a collection of short stories by debut Nigerian author Arinze Ifeakandu.
Publishing director Federico Andornino acquired UK & Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to the collection in a four-way auction, doing the deal with Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein acting on behalf of MMQ, the American publisher A Public Space Books and The Wylie Agency.
It will publish in export trade paperback, e-book and audio digital download on 7th June 2022 and on 28th July 2022 in hardback.
So far, the book has received praise from Booker Prize-winning author Damon Galgut, writer Eloghosa Osunde and Colm Tóibín. "A man revisits the university campus where he lost his first love, aware now of what he couldn’t understand then," the synopsis reads. "A daughter returns home to Lagos after the death of her father, where she must face her past – and future – relationship with his long-time partner. A young musician rises to fame at the risk of losing himself and the man who loves him.
"Generations collide, families break and are remade, languages and cultures intertwine, and lovers find their ways to futures; from childhood through adulthood; on university campuses, city centres, and neighbourhoods where church bells mingle with the morning call to prayer.
"These nine stories of queer male intimacy brim with simmering secrecy, ecstasy, loneliness and love in their depictions of what it means to be gay in contemporary Nigeria. A debut of emotional charge, marking a compassionate, important new voice in fiction."
Andornino said: "Reading Arinze’s stories for the first time felt almost like an out of body experience: I had the immediate, clear sensation of being in the presence of not just a brilliant writer, but a future classic, an author who is destined to join the ranks of artists such as Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. God’s Children Are Little Broken Things is set in Nigeria but its emotional impact will travel much further: in the words of Colm Tóibín ‘These stories dramatize what love is like in a time when love is under siege’; and what is more universal than love?"
Ifeakandu was born in Kano, Nigeria, and currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida. An AKO Caine Prize for African Writing finalist and A Public Space Writing Fellow, he is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from A Public Space, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, One Story, Redemption Song and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2018.
"I remember being in secondary school and writing a juvenilia about three boys in a love triangle, and seeing, in my mind’s eye, a boy in a country faraway reading my book while lying on his couch, and understanding me, all the things I felt, the love I dreamed of. Understanding me perfectly," the author said. "I loved this book, which I’d written for my own entertainment, and read it every chance I got, as did some of my classmates, my notebook travelling from hand to hand, eventually returning to me frayed and dog-eared. This is a different book from the one I toyed with in those early years, but it is a product of the same longing, a fulfillment of the same dream: to one day write a book that would find a boy like me, wherever he was, letting him know he was not alone.
"For many years, the characters in God’s Children Are Little Broken Things kept me company, kind companions for the moments. They were there in Nsukka, where I began the collection in 2013; there at my first heartbreak; there when I tried America and ached for home. When overwhelmed with questions – Why is the world this way? What is Nigeria doing to us, the young, and what has it done to our parents? Who is the man emerging from the pyres of this inner boy? – I found a listener in my ever-silent computer and, at the end of every road, the beauty and truth of life ordered in language. What a gift, to have grown alongside these stories; I hope readers find in their pages some friendly company, too."
