Nudibranch: the collection from MBE for Literature recipient Irenosen Okojie

(Paperback)

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'Okojie is a dazzlingly wild, bold and imaginative writer who tells stories with captivating originality and intense drama' Bernardine Evaristo

'Dazzling . . . A feast for the senses' Diana Evans

Winner of the AKO Cain Prize

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In this collection of short stories, offbeat characters are caught up in extraordinary situations that test the boundaries of reality . . .

A love-hungry goddess of the sea arrives on an island inhabited by eunuchs.

A girl from Martinique moonlights as a Grace Jones impersonator.

Dimension-hopping monks sworn to silence must face a bloody reckoning.

And a homeless man goes right back, to the very beginning, through a gap in time.

Nudibranch is a dark and seductive foray into the surreal.

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PRAISE FOR IRENOSEN OKOJIE

'One of the most original and innovative writers to emerge in many a year'

ALEX WHEATLE MBE

'Okojie has a sharp eye for the twisting stories of the city, and a turn of phrase that switches from elegance to brutality in a single line'

STELLA DUFFY

Reviews

There are few writers who possess quite the boundless daring of Irenosen Okojie . . . Nudibranch is dazzling, a feast for the senses, as well as a lesson in both creative and existential bravery - Observer (Best Books of 2019)

Irenosen Okojie is one of our finest short story writers. Nudibranch is her second collection and in it her imagination runs riot. Linguistically inventive and always unpredictable, there is an emotional intensity and weirdness to her story telling that haunts and lingers - Observer (Best Books of 2019)

You'll need a flashlight with long battery life, because the prose is so fierce and melodic that you'll be up all night - Literary Hub

[Irenosen Okojie's] imagination and her lyrical writing come together [and] her fantastical, disjointed tales speak for our damaged, out-of-kilter times. They are, to borrow her phrase, full of warped, rhapsodic song - New Internationalist

Okojie's imagination is frequently funny, and defiantly weird. Her slippery stories are not bound by logic, time or place; both within and between tales she dives between the genres of fable, dystopia, allegory, lyrically conceived realism, and horror - The Arts Desk

Author Bio

Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British writer. Her debut novel Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for an Edinburgh International First Book Award. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post amongst other publications. Her short story collection Speak Gigantular was shortlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. Nudibranch, her second collection was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize, the story Grace Jones won the 2020 AKO Caine Prize. A fellow and Vice Chair of The Royal Society of Literature, she is the co-presenter of the BBC's Novels That Shaped Our World podcast, Turn Up For The Books. She was awarded an MBE For Services to Literature in 2021.