Ranging from Paris to a Connecticut boarding school to a harrowing walk through the streets of Palestine, and touching on lessons from Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Mohsin Hamid, August Wilson, Dear White People, and Black Panther, Onyebuchi blends memoir and cultural criticism to explore the ways in which identities, like diamonds, are pressurized into existence by suffering, and how “the other side of suffering is self-determination.” Provoked by the fraught relationship between the African continent and American culture in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, acclaimed Nigerian-American novelist Tochi Onyebuchi takes an emotional and intellectual journey through his own education in Blackness-his first loves, his introduction to politics, and his eventual commitment to the struggle.

When Did You First Realize You Were Black?

Brick by brick, their houses are sent to the colonies, what was once a home now a quaint reminder for the colonists of the world that they wrecked.Ī primal biblical epic flung into the future, Goliath weaves together disparate narratives-a space-dweller looking at New Haven, Connecticut as a chance to reconnect with his spiraling lover a group of laborers attempting to renew the promises of Earth’s crumbling cities a journalist attempting to capture the violence of the streets a marshal trying to solve a kidnapping-into a richly urgent mosaic about race, class, gentrification, and who is allowed to be the hero of any history. As they eke out an existence, their neighborhoods are being cannibalized. Those left behind salvage what they can from the collapsing infrastructure. Those with the means and the privilege have departed the great cities of the United States for the more comfortable confines of space colonies. In his adult novel debut, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Award finalist and ALA Alex and New England Book Award winner Tochi Onyebuchi delivers a sweeping science fiction epic in the vein of Samuel R. Riveting, disturbing, and rendered in masterful detail.”-Leigh Bardugo “Onyebuchi sets fire to the boundary between fiction and reality, and brings a crumbling city and an all too plausible future to vibrant life.

Goliath book tochi