Nudibranch

by Irenosen Okojie

Paper Book, 2019

Status

Available

Call number

823.92

Genres

General Fiction

Fiction

Collection

Fiction

Publication

London : Dialogue Books, [2019]

Description

'Okojie is a dazzlingly wild, bold and imaginative writer who tells stories with captivating originality and intense drama' Bernardine Evaristo 'Dazzling . . . A feast for the senses' Diana EvansWinner of the AKO Cain Prize____________In this collection of short stories, offbeat characters are caught up in extraordinary situations that test the boundaries of reality . . . A love-hungry goddess of the sea arrives on an island inhabited by eunuchs. A girl from Martinique moonlights as a Grace Jones impersonator. Dimension-hopping monks sworn to silence must face a bloody reckoning.And a homeless man goes right back, to the very beginning, through a gap in time. Nudibranch is a dark and seductive foray into the surreal.____________PRAISE FOR IRENOSEN OKOJIE 'One of the most original and innovative writers to emerge in many a year'ALEX WHEATLE MBE'Okojie has a sharp eye for the twisting stories of the city, and a turn of phrase that switches from elegance to brutality in a single line'STELLA DUFFY… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member JosephCamilleri

There’s speculative fiction. There’s weird fiction. And then there’s the fiction of Irenosen Okojie, where the term “weird” is taken not just to another level, but another dimension. The fifteen stories in “Nudibranch” are mostly (but not always) set in recognisable places: the

streets of London and Berlin, a monastery (somewhere in England?), an international airport. Yet, what happens in them is almost so bizarre as to be incomprehensible. One story, for instance, features time-travelling monks carrying out bloody acts under the watchful eye of a team of saints. Another involves a woman who turns into liquorice.

These flights of fancy are certainly intriguing. However, getting through this collection was, admittedly, particularly difficult. Okojie not only presents the reader with surreal scenarios, but conveys them in a dense, metaphor-laden language which straddles the worlds of prose and poetry and makes the strangeness stranger. Whether one enjoys this depends, I suspect, not just on one’s taste but also on one’s mood at a given point in time. I must admit that there were times when I just couldn’t get into the stories. And there are some of the pieces which I just didn’t understand despite my best efforts. Recommended if you like your fiction different and challenging.

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