Hangman
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
<p>An existential journey, a tragic farce, a slapstick tragedy: a shockingly original debut novel about exile, diaspora and the search for Black refuge
A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years living in exile in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn't recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone at the airport knows him-a man who calls him brother. As they travel to this man's house, the purpose of his visit comes into focus: he is here to find his real brother, who is dying.
In Hangman, Maya Binyam tells the story of this twisted odyssey, and of the phantoms and tricksters, aid workers and taxi drivers, the relatives, riddles and strangers that lead this man along a circuitous path towards the truth. Hangman is an uncommonly assured debut: a strangely honest story of one man's stubborn search for refuge-in this world and the one that lies beyond it.</p>
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.
