The Road to the Country

The Road to the Country (pub. date June 4, 2024) is Chigozie Obioma’s third book and probably his most ambitious. If you want to read a superbly-written historical novel about a war that a lot of the Western world is not familiar with, I highly recommend it. His first two novels were Booker Prize finalists, and The Road to the Country is without doubt an award-winner.

Like his first two novels, An Orchestra of Minorities and The Fishermen, the novel is permeated with sadness, but overall it is not bleak. And like his first two novels, Obioma blends folklore and reality seamlessly, as chapters alternate between the present and the past through the eyes of a shaman who is watching the main character’s life.

Kunle, a college student in the late 1960s in Lagos, the son of an Igbo woman and Yoruba man, is asked by his parents to find his wheelchair-using brother, who has gone away with a neighbor to a part of the country–Biafra–that has decided to secede from Nigeria and is now under siege. Oblivious, Kunle has no concept that there’s a war going on, but he holds guilt for having caused the accident that caused his brother to need a wheelchair, so he goes in search of him.

In Biafra, he finds himself caught up in a situation from which he cannot escape–part of the Biafran army, fighting for a cause he swears allegiance to but which seems hopeless. Amazingly, he finds friendship with his fellow soldiers, and love with one of the female soldiers, and eventually finds his brother as well.

Though Obioma’s writing is breathtakingly beautiful, it was very hard to read because of the terror, the hunger, the violence, the cruelty of humans. I wasn’t really in the mood for an all-encompassing war novel, but the writing got me through. I couldn’t stop reading because I had faith that the Kunle would make it through the war. I think The Road to the Country ended with more hope than Obioma’s first two books, but this is clearly a war novel and Obioma does not shy away from describing the horrific realities of it.