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Search Sweet Country
  • Published: 5 November 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241370094
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $26.99

Search Sweet Country

Formats & editions
EBook
30 May 2019
Paperback
5 Nov 2019
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A startling, densely poetic portrait of 1970s Ghana as it emerges from colonial rule

Winner of the Valco Fund Literary Award for Fiction and the Ghana Book Award

Search Sweet Country follows the lives of an eclectic, interconnected group of Ghanaians living in and around the sprawling, chaotic city of Accra in the mid-1970s. Bringing the city to life in dizzying, lyrical prose, Laing weaves a story filled with bizarre and often melancholy characters: an idealistic professor, a lovely young witch, a wide-eyed student, a corrupt politician and his hack sidekick, a business-savvy young woman, a healer, a bishop and a crazy man intent on founding his own village. Their collective narratives create a portrait of a country where colonialism is dying, but democracy remains elusive. Search Sweet Country is a timeless, near-forgotten gem by a virtuosic writer, as necessary now as when the book was first published. Like Joyce's Dublin and Dickens's London, Laing's Accra brims with both lush specificity and universal relevance.
  • Published: 5 November 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241370094
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $26.99
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Praise for Search Sweet Country

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