Paul, the eldest and favored son in the Utu family, is 17 when he disappears amid civil unrest in Nigeria in 1995, leading parents Bendic and Ma to question religion, 15-year-old sister, Bibi, to grapple with doubt, and 13-year-old brother, Ajie, to swell with guilt, as he was the last to see Paul alive. Chapters in this debut by Ile acutely portray the anxiety and fear of the Biafran War and the decades following by mixing Ajie's recollections of the years leading up to Paul's disappearance with his reflections of a country in turmoil. In their comfortable home in Port Harcourt, mischievous Ajie spars with Bibi while both siblings resent and respect Paul. Visits to their ancestral village of Ogibah remind the Utu clan of ongoing clashes between residents who either welcome or oppose the omnipresent oil company that has destroyed farms yet built schools and roads. Ile shares Ajie's emotional journey as he comes of age, spends five and then ten years abroad, and returns home upon hearing unexpected news of Paul. Meanwhile, visitors shy away; as one character says, "When misfortune befalls you, people secretly blame you." VERDICT Equal parts family mystery, government critique, and meditation on love and loss, Ile's telling words will appeal to anyone who enjoys a story well told. [See Prepub Alert, 8/31/15.]-Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Set in Nigeria in the late twentieth century, Ile's debut chronicles the life of the Utu family before and after the disappearance of their eldest son. On a sunny afternoon in the fall of 1995, 17-year-old Paul tells his younger brother, Ajie, that he is going to meet a friend and and then vanishes without a trace. Ile reveals the family dynamic through vignettes of the loving sibling rivalry between Paul, Ajie, and their sister, Bibi, and the struggles of their parents, Nne and Benedict, during the Biafran War in the 1960s. Though the Utus live in the city of Port Harcourt, their family comes from the village of Ogibah, where a greedy oil corporation is trying to bribe the citizens into letting the company build a pipeline across their property. Though the lack of a linear story can occasionally be jarring, Ile vividly evokes life in Nigeria at the end of the twentieth century and the plight of the people who navigate the sweeping changes and startling corruption while trying to go about their daily lives.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2016 Booklist

Set in southern Nigeria, Ile's debut novel pits the personal against the political in a slow-burning family drama. The year is 1995: university students take to the streets to agitate for better funding; NEPA, the country's electric utility, can't keep the grid juiced; the military government hangs nine dissidents. Yet in the swirl of postcolonial struggle, the Utu family has built a stable life of bourgeois respectability in metropolitan Port Harcourt, while keeping close ties to their ancestral village of Ogibah. One day, 17-year-old Paul Utu disappears. The novel rewinds to Ajie's childhood, eventually finishing in the present day. It is through precocious Ajie, the youngest sibling, that we learn the Utu family history, from their tribe's origin story and grandfather's Christianization through the horrors of the Biafran War and into the mid-'90s. As quick-tempered Ajie comes of age, the novel depicts the contradictions of his mother's Christianity, his father's indefatigable liberalism, and their family bonds-all of which, already stretched thin between the old world and the new, are further strained by Paul's disappearance. Though he occasionally burdens young Ajie with adult concerns that seem implausibly heavy, Ile hits the emotional register of childhood experiences, like the all-or-nothing satisfaction of following older kids in climbing a tree, or the searing heat of school humiliations. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

THERE IS A recurring motif of someone switching on a light bulb in Jowhor Ile's laudable first novel, "And After Many Days." The book begins in Nigeria in 1995, when the country was shrouded in literal and metaphorical darkness - plagued by war, corruption, and frequent and annoying power cuts. But this idea of a light that has gone out also applies to the family at the center of the book, a family whose own light is to be snuffed out by tragedy. "And After Many Days" follows the Utus, a middle-class and well-respected family living in Port Harcourt whose 17-year-old son, Paul, "the exemplary firstborn," goes out to visit a friend and never returns home. The Utus are thrown into confusion, then despair. "To tell Paul's story, you would have to start from before he was born," Ile writes, and the novel wheels back into the family's past, from the arrival of the British colonial government and Christian missionaries in Nigeria through the civil war. We encounter the family at the height of their happiness seen through the perspective of Ajie, the youngest child, who saw Paul last and blames himself for his brother's disappearance: "Guilt rose like tidewater up to his chest and made breathing very difficult. If anyone could have spared Paul from going missing, it should have been him." We stay with Ajie for decades, until he discovers what has happened to his brother. Ile begins the book with assurance and authority. In evoking Paul's disappearance, he creates an atmosphere of ominous tension and renders the grief of the family in restrained and moving language. He has a particular talent for selecting the perfect details that make even a passing moment come to life: "Ajie once saw a bride, her dress blindingly white in the sunlight, her pineapple hairstyle tightly gelled and held down with a tiara, alight from a black Benz with visible encouragement from her cohort. They had flagged down an okada for her while she snaked her way through the traffic with her maid of honor on her tail." The bride hops onto the motorbike to get to her own wedding in time, sweating lightly and gripping her "pink and yellow and plastic" bouquet. So readers might be baffled after the first three chapters when all four wheels of the novel come flying off beneath it. What began as a suspenseful story of a disappearance suddenly becomes a quiet study of a family, at a very quotidian level, mostly. In the absence of plot, however, the novel gathers a different kind of energy, and a political subplot. It shuttles between settings and years to tell the story of Nigeria's troubled oil-rich regions, and the families who are frustrated to find their fate in the hands of powerful oil corporations and every disagreement settled by violence. "Disputes are no longer settled with raised voices in a meeting," Ile writes. "People no longer write strongly worded petitions to voice their dissent. If you disagree with someone these days, you simply go over to the person's house with your face unmasked and shoot him The body count is on a steep rise." But some harm is done with this swerve in pacing and focus. Paul's disappearance loses its impact, so by the time the novel circles back to him, most readers will not care. And the close third-person perspective is poorly handled; too often observations and reflections feel implausibly, and even erroneously, forced on Ajie. The voice that distinguished the early sections turns passive and awkward, reappearing only intermittently until the last act, in which we discover Paul's fate. The novel ends with Ajie turning on a light, ending a story that has scarcely just begun. CHIGOZIE OBIOMA is the author of "The Fishermen," a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award.

A family reckons with the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of a child in this debut novel from a young Nigerian writer. On the eve of Ajie and Bibi's return to high school, their 17-year-old older brother, Paul, steps out to see a friend and doesn't return. The night passes, then another day. Paul, the well-behaved, exemplary student, has never disappeared before, and the household is thrown into turmoil. "Paul knows how dangerous the roads can be at night," murmurs his worried mother. Paul's father turns to the police, then radio and newspaper announcements. As the last person to see Paul before his disappearance, Ajie, the youngest child, is wracked with guilt that shadows his relationships with his sister, Bibi, and their parents. The story gracefully weaves back and forth in time from the siblings' early childhood to the present day in their Port Harcourt, Nigeria, neighborhood, and suddenly, every little thing is imbued with deeper meaning, made fateful through retrospect. "Things happen in clusters," Ajie thinks. And this was a year "of rumors, radio announcements, student riots, and sudden disappearances," a year where "five young men had been shot dead by the square in broad daylight." This is the world of Ajie and his family, a world Ile builds in rich, vivid details. But the disappearance of Paul remains the central driving question of the narrative. Where did he go? And was his disappearance fair play or foul? This engrossing novel, couched in poetic, evocative language, creates a suspenseful yet sophisticated narrative from the first page. Here are beautifully drawn characters grounded in the universal story of young Ajie discovering the world around hima world recovering from the not-so-distant wars of the previous generations and their legacy, which still bleeds into present politics. A deeply rewarding novel that heralds the birth of a major new literary talent. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.