Arrows of Rain

Praise for Arrows of Rain "Highly evocative." —Nobel Prize Laureate Wole Soyinka "The greatest villain in Okey Ndibe's Arrows of Rain is silence." —Vanity Fair "Smart and often deftly written, a parable of power and the humanity it strips away . . . Arrows of Rain remains a novel of resistance—if not political resistance, exactly, then resistance at the level of the soul." —David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times "Ndibe is a gifted writer and an adept storyteller, who clearly exults in the telling." —Essence Magazine "A heart-wrenching portrait of Femi Adero, a young journalist who comes face to face with the extremes of political dictatorship and the dangers of pursuing unlikely truths." —Daily Nation (Kenya) "This novel does what great novels are supposed to do. It creates a new world that, bigger than ours, closer than ours, more intense than ours, brings us back to where we live with a better understanding of just what our lives mean to those we will never see, touch or know." —Rick Kleffel, KQED Public Radio "Arrows of Rain is Greek tragedy . . . It serves as a powerful reminder that the imprint of history—its machinations and cultural usurpations, its elevations and denigrations—is not merely on the subsequent chronicle, but on subsequent individual souls as well." —The Cleveland Plain-Dealer "A moving and compelling novel." —Brooklyn Bugle "A fascinating and important story—one that truly must be told." —New York Journal of Books "This haunting work about the costs of silence shows that Nbide, who was mentored by the towering Chinua Achebe, belongs in the pantheon of contemporary African-born writers such as ­Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nuruddin Farah, Dinaw Mengestu, and Ishmael Beah, whose powerful stories must be told." —Library Journal "What do you do, Ndibe asks, when you are faced with injustice and total corruption? When to speak will very likely mean your end? A Kafkaesque, imaginative novel of great necessity and power." —Kirkus Reviews  "An ambitious and brave first novel . . . [that] could jump start the moral political mission of serious African literature begun so well by Ousmane, Ngugi, and the immortal Achebe." —Michael Ekwueme Thelwell, author of The Harder They Come "Arrows of Rain is a brooding and powerful first novel from Nigerian Okey Ndibe . . . a gritty political thriller with real emotional depth which poses vital questions about our responsibility to bear witness; to be the custodian of ‘stories which must be told.’" —New Internationalist   "Alluring, crisp and lucid . . . [Ndibe] is a novelist who portrays his characters, whether poor or rich, weak or powerful, with great complexity." —Sahara Reporters "Arrows of Rain is an eloquent, engaging story. The novel makes evil repellingly ugly by taking off its mask . . . Yes, indeed, 'speech is the mouth's debt to the story'; Ndibe has paid that debt with a telling that sparkles with felicity and insight." —Niyi Osundare, author of Pages from the Book of the Sun "First rate fiction." —John Edgar Wideman, author of Philadelphia Fire "A blueprint for the second generation of African novelists." —Ernest Emenyonu, author of Tales of Our Motherland Praise for Foreign Gods, Inc. "Razor-sharp . . . Mr. Ndibe invests his story with enough dark comedy to make Ngene an odoriferous presence in his own righ