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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
October 2015
On Sale: September 22, 2015
336 pages ISBN: 0544003446 EAN: 9780544003446 Kindle: B00QPI1O2E Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
Inspired by Nigeria’s folktales and its war, Under the
Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful
debut about the dangers of living and loving
openly.
Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does;
born before independence, she is eleven when civil war
breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to
safety, she meets another displaced child and they,
star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic
communities. They are also both
girls. When their love is
discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this
part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie.
As Edwidge
Danticat has made personal the legacy of Haiti’s political
coming of age, Okparanta’s Under the Udala
Trees uses one woman’s lifetime to examine the ways
in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood.
Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the
effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are also wrecked
and lost from taboo and prejudice. This story offers a
glimmer of hope — a future where a woman might just be able
to shape her life around truth and
love. Acclaimed by Vogue,
the Financial Times, and many others,
Chinelo Okparanta continues to distill “experience into
something crystalline, stark but lustrous” ( New York
Times Book Review). Under the Udala
Trees marks the further rise of a star whose “tales
will break your heart open” ( New York Daily News).
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