Hangman
A Novel
-
-
4.7 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vulture, and BBC
An enthralling and original first novel about exile, diaspora, and the impossibility of Black refuge in America and beyond.
In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up.
A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn’t recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone recognizes him, a man who calls him brother—setting him on a quest to find his real brother, who is dying.
In Hangman, Maya Binyam tells the story of that search, and of the phantoms, guides, tricksters, bureaucrats, debtors, taxi drivers, relatives, and riddles that will lead to the truth.
This is an uncommonly assured debut: an existential journey; a tragic farce; a slapstick tragedy; and a strange, and strangely honest, story of one man’s stubborn quest to find refuge—in this world and in the world that lies beyond it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Binyam's beguiling and dreamlike debut chronicles an immigrant man's return to his home country after 26 years. The unnamed narrator, a 50-something Black man, doesn't know why he's traveling, and the reader only knows someone has called him on the phone to say arrangements have been made for his trip. During the flight, an attendant inexplicably informs the narrator that the passenger next to him is dead. After he lands, a taxi takes him along roads that seem "random and resistant " and he arrives at a bus depot with a vague sense that he's meant to visit his dying brother. The route is circuitous, and it leads to an ending that's twisty and illuminating. Along the way, the narrator has a series of random and mordantly funny encounters that highlight themes of colonialism and cultural differences (a foreign white woman who has adopted a Black farmer's son claims she's committed to "the work of mutual understanding," and a local former clergyman says of a pile of donated clothing from abroad: "Although these people were ashamed of their old possessions, they were nevertheless attached to the idea of their possessions being used to their full extent"). This is one of those novels that demands a second reading, and is well worth the time.
