Every Day Is for the Thief (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780812995787)

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY DWIGHT GARNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle NPR The Root The Telegraph The Globe and Mail

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - FINALIST, PHILLIS WHEATLEY BOOK AWARD - TEJU COLE WAS NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL AFRICANS OF THE YEAR BY NEW AFRICAN MAGAZINE

For readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Michael Ondaatje, Every Day Is for the Thief is a wholly original work of fiction by Teju Cole, whose critically acclaimed debut, Open City, was the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by more than twenty publications.

Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud.

A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the "yahoo yahoo" diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet caf , longs after a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused of stealing at a local market.

Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos life--creative, malevolent, ambiguous--and slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself.

In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven with original photos by the author, Every Day Is for the Thief--originally published in Nigeria in 2007--is a wholly original work of fiction. This revised and updated edition is the first version of this unique book to be made available outside Africa. You've never read a book like Every Day Is for the Thief because no one writes like Teju Cole.

Praise for Every Day Is for the Thief

"A luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and return . . . extraordinary."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Cole is following in a long tradition of writerly walkers who, in the tradition of Baudelaire, make their way through urban spaces on foot and take their time doing so. Like Alfred Kazin, Joseph Mitchell, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (with whom he is often compared), Cole adds to the literature in his own zeitgeisty fashion."--The Boston Globe


Author: Teju Cole
ISBN-10: 0812995783
ISBN-13: 9780812995787
Publisher: Random House
Language: English
Published: 03/25/2014
Pages: 176
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 8.51h x 5.88w x 0.83d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/01/2013 pg. 59
Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2014
Ebony 04/01/2014 pg. 34
New Yorker (The) 03/31/2014 pg. 77
Shelf Awareness 03/28/2014
Booklist 04/15/2014 pg. 14
Publishers Weekly 04/14/2014
New York Times Book Review 03/30/2014 pg. 14
Entertainment Weekly 04/11/2014 pg. 70
New York Times Book Review 04/06/2014 pg. 32
New York Review of Books 07/10/2014 pg. 61
Library Journal 10/01/2013