"Blessings" is available in the UK today and will hit US shelves on June 4th, 2024. Already, the book has received rave reviews from The Guardian, I News, and The Telegraph, as well as a personal recommendation from Zadie Smith.
ABOUT BLESSINGS:
“Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s writing has a certain delicacy to it, so wonderfully observant, and so beautiful.”
—Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, author of Americanah
"While this beautiful image is one of a mother’s enduringly nurturing force, Ibeh’s extraordinarily composed and deeply felt debut ultimately asks a different question. Its protagonist faces a difficult and universal challenge: how do we rise from broken beginnings and find better ways of nurturing ourselves?"
—Betsy Reed, Editor, Guardian US (See the full review.)
"Blessings, the magnificent debut novel from Chukwuebuka Ibeh, follows a young man’s coming-of-age in a febrile nation."
—Katherine Waters, for The Telegraph (See the full review.)
SYNOPSIS:
Obiefuna has always been the black sheep of his family—sensitive where his father, Anozie, is pragmatic, a dancer where his brother, Ekene, is a natural athlete. But when an intimate connection blossoms between Obiefuna and a boy from a nearby village, happiness is fleeting once his father catches them together and banishes him to boarding school.
Obiefuna finds and hides who he truly is as he navigates his new school’s strict hierarchy and unpredictable violence. Back home, his mother Uzoamaka must contend with the absence of her beloved son, her husband’s cryptic reasons for sending him away, and the hard truths that they’ve all been hiding from. As Nigeria teeters on the brink of criminalizing same-sex relationships, Obiefuna’s life, or the life he wants to live, becomes even further out of a reach and more dangerous than ever before.
Told from the alternating perspectives of Obiefuna and Uzoamaka, Blessings is an elegant and exquisitely moving story that asks how to live freely in a country that forbids one’s truest self, and the love that can flourish in spite of it all.
See the book, and preorder your copy today, from Penguin Random House, or at bookstores worldwide.
