Favourite Five: Eghosa Imasuen

Eghosa Imasuen, author of To Saint Patrick and Fine Boys is not new to the GCLF. We asked him to send us a short piece on his favourite five books; he had this to say. "Okay, I get this call from my friends at The Voice. Eghosa, we want you to write a little thing about the best five books you've read. Of all time? I ask. Yes, they say. Hard task, I say. They know. I can do it. So here goes. I have gone down the path of picking books which had a profound impact on me, on my world view, on my education. Some of these provoked me to ask more questions, and they entertained me immensely. Something I believe all fiction must do. I have arranged these entries more or less haphazardly; if there is any pattern, it is in the impact they had on my writing."

The Haj by Leon Uris

I read this book in university. It was my first Leon Uris book, and I was initially afraid of its volume, wondering how small me could finish what looked like a thousand-page epic. But Uris’ talents lie in moving the reader so quickly along his immensely enjoyable plots, while he also gives them a history lesson. The Haj follows the Palestinian tragedy. It goes back and forth, following a Palestinian Arab family, giving us a glimpse into their traditions. It wears the author’s opinions boldly, laying the blame for the current conflict at the feet of the British and the surrounding Arab states.

The Haj made me to read. It made me form an opinion based on the information as I could gather; it made me look with suspicion at the eschatologically-driven fatalism that drives much of the opinions of Nigerian evangelicals. It made me understand that villainy resides everywhere, side by side with heroism and love and beauty.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

Being a novelist, I felt odd putting a work of non-fiction on this list. But it is with a nod to the power of Preston’s prose that it has to be mentioned here. I read this book while working as a doctor in Warri. It conflated all the knowledge the world had at that point in time into a compact, eminently readable, non-fiction thriller.

The Hot Zone follows the outbreak at a US Army base of an exotic viral infection. This haemorrhagic fever outbreak allows the writer to take a journey into Equatorial Africa, the ancestral home of humanity, and of some of humanity’s oldest enemies. It explains the unintended consequences of modernity’s inexorable advance into the places of our origins. It is one of the best, most readable ripostes to the nonsense of alternative AIDS origin theory.

Fatherland by Robert Harris

I first heard of this novel after I watched the trailer of the movie adaptation. I still haven’t seen the movie, but I have since read the book. It is alternate history. It is genre fiction told so well, and by a first-time novelist, former journalist Robert Harris.

Its central premise is that the Nazi’s won World War Two. Its point of divergence is never pinpointed, but it would seem that Reinhard Heydrich’s survival of the 1942 assassination by British-trained Czech agents in Prague would have had major consequences had it happened. It is the 1960s in this alternate timeline. The USA and The Reich are negotiating détente. Secrets risk messing up everything. It is alternate history, and there is only so much I can mention in this little essay without spoiling a good thriller for you, dear reader. Suffice it to say that the world in which a Nazi superpower exists would be a strange place indeed. My first novel, To Saint Patrick, owes this work of art a debt of gratitude.

American Gods (The Tenth Anniversary Edition) by Neil Gaiman

Imagine reading a novel and listening to it at the same time. I'd heard of this book for a while. But it was after I heard that a special tenth anniversary edition had been published, with more than 12,000 words from the original manuscript restored, that I decided to look for it and read. I purchased the kindle edition and started reading. It is a massive book, and threatened to interfere with work. So I purchased the audio book too. And I listened to the book to and from work, and read from where I stopped in bed or at the dinner table. I am still in love with this book.

It is fantasy, science fiction, horror, travel fiction. It is everything and nothing. It asks, what if all the gods, and fairies, and monsters dreamed up by man in the lost places of the world, what if all these were alive, brought into being and are sustained by and thrive on our belief? What if we stopped believing? I cannot recommend Neil Gaiman enough. And this is his magnum opus.

Everything Good Will Come and Purple Hibiscus–  Sefi Atta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am going to cheat here. I am going to treat these books as one. I bought them on the same day in 2005, and read them back to back. They were both published by who would become my publisher, the Farafina imprint of Kachifo Ltd.

I had already started work on my first novel. I travelled to Lagos to shop for books, to see what the competition was writing when I bought these novels. They opened my eyes. Atta’s EGWC was a decade removed from my experience, but I found in its pages memories of uncles in my parents’ Boys Quarters, listening to Bob Marley, and of my aunties and older cousins, with perms, and shoulder-padded impossible square-cut blouses and high-waist stone wash mom-jeans. I saw the tragedy begin, the tragedy that would soon become mine.

This was where Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus began. The story had become ours. The breadwinners who became villains in their own homes. The rise and rise of inept political leadership, the lowering and lowering of standards till it’s now underground, so deep, it competes with our crude oil deposits for living space.

Both these books told me that my generation’s story had begun to be told. These novels confirmed to me that I had to keep on writing.