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Search Sweet Country

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780241370094

  • Length: 368  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 21mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 269g

  • RRP: £10.99

Search Sweet Country

Accra, Ghana, the 1970s. In the streets, marketplaces and crowded houses of this sprawling city, an unforgettable cast of characters live, love and try to get by: an idealistic professor, a beautiful young witch, a wide-eyed student, a corrupt politician, a healer and a man intent on founding his own village. Through their stories, and those of the living, breathing city itself, Kojo Laing's dazzling novel creates a portrait of a place caught between colonialism and freedom, eternity and the present.

'The finest novel written in English ever to come out of the African continent' Binyavanga Wainaina

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780241370094

  • Length: 368  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 21mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 269g

  • RRP: £10.99

Reviews

  • Surreal and satirical ... Laing has found an original voice that is all the stronger for making few concessions to the Western reader: wild, sophisticated, sorrowful

    New York Times

  • Gleefully energetic ... there is an extravagant hopefulness in Kojo Laing

    London Review of Books

  • Laing pushed the English language to its limits and beyond, by fusing Oxbridge English with West African Pidgin, elements from African languages and his own coinings, aiming at creating one gigantic, living and truly cosmopolitan language ... A treasure trove of imagery and refelctions which are just as amusing, relevant and thought-provoking as when they were written

    The Voice

  • Kojo Laing is one of the unsung heroes of African fiction. His prose is poetic, densely packed with strange juxtapositions and more ideas on one page than most writers use for several books. Search Sweet Country is an amazing achievement

    Johannesburg Review of Books

  • Reading Search Sweet Country is like reading a dream ... Each page delivers an intense blast of vivid imagery, a world in which landscapes come to life when inanimate objects receive human characterization ... Laing is a master stylist, and Search Sweet Country delivers an absorbing, if demanding, world for both its characters and the reader

    Uzodinma Iweala, Slate Magazine

  • An intricate, beautifully rambling novel ... a compelling and rewarding read

    Publishers Weekly

  • Search Sweet Country can be read over and over, continually surprising with a fresh turn of phrase or nuance in character, always engaging, always beautiful. The search is worthwhile

    Pittsburgh Gazette

  • Exuberantly reels with language and imagery reminiscent of the early Joyce

    Library Journal

  • A figurative, comic treat, filled with wild characters and dizzy, wink-filled prose

    FlavorWire

  • African literature's greatest linguistic innovator

    Brittle Paper Magazine

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About the Author

Kojo Laing

Kojo Laing was born on the Gold Coast, Ghana, in 1946, studied in Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1960s, before returning to Accra, where he would spend the rest of his life as a novelist, poet and educator. A writer of soaring originality and pioneer of Afrofuturism, his Search Sweet Country (1986) won numerous awards, vast critical acclaim, and has been praised as 'the finest novel written in English ever to come out of the African continent' (Binyavanga Wainaina).

Kojo Laing

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