Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa

** AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST AND BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR 2023 **** SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO BOOK AWARDS 2023: DEBUT FICTION **‘A voice unlike any other’ OBSERVER‘I fell in love immediately’ MAX PORTER‘A writer of imagination and flair’ ECONOMIST‘Smart, subversive, funny, heartbreaking’ KAMILA SHAMSIE‘Buoro's writing deserves to inspire a generation of superheroes’ THE TIMESFifteen-year-old Andrew Aziza lives in Kontagora, Nigeria, where his days are spent about town with his droogs, Slim and Morocca, grappling with his fantasies about white girls – especially blondes – and wondering who his father is. When he’s not in church, at school or attempting to form ‘Africa’s first superheroes’, he obsesses over mathematical theorems, ideas of black power and HXVX: the Curse of Africa. Sure enough, the reluctantly nicknamed ‘Andy Africa’ soon falls hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on, Eileen. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. An unfamiliar man claims, despite his mother’s denials, to be Andy’s father, and the gathering of an anti-Christian mob is headed for the church – both set to shake the foundations of everything Andy knows and loves. The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa announces a dazzling, distinctive, new literary voice. Profound, exhilarating and highly original, this tragicomic novel is a stunning exploration of the contemporary African ‘condition’, the relentless infiltration of Western culture and, most of all, the ordinary but impossible challenges of coming of age in a turbulent world.

This is extraordinary, driven by a gloriously eccentric central character. It is utterly compelling, not shy about posing difficult questions for the reader, The pleasure here is as much in the journey as the destination, with sex, terrorism and, er, catechisms in the mix. Buoro has energy to burn, Craft and verve abound in this tragicomic coming-of-age debut fuelled by the lapel-grabbing voice of its 15-year-old narrator, Andy . . . Both sweet and sour, it offers a family story, a thwarted romance and a story of friendship, A smart and incisive coming-of-age tragicomedy, The vivid immediacy of Buoro’s prose is transporting, his similes as alive as the scenes he paints . . . [Buoro's] writing deserves to inspire a generation of superheroes

Stephen Buoro was born in Nigeria in 1993. He has an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia as well as a first class degree in Mathematics, and is a recipient of the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship. He was awarded second place in the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, and is currently studying for a fully-funded PhD in Creative & Critical Writing at UEA. The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa is his first novel.