Part Bildungsroman, part Greek tragedy, "The Fishermen" may be the most interesting debut novel to emerge from Nigeria this year. It recounts the story of an Igbo family of four brothers who grow up in a small town in the south-west of the country. Their father is strict, but proud: he wants one to be an airline pilot, another a lawyer, the third a family doctor. The youngest, nine-year-old Benjamin, who loves animals, will be a professor. The townspeople laugh at the paterfamilias and his dreams, but he swats them off like mosquitoes. No loafing for his sons. Shortly after the father's bosses at the Central Bank of Nigeria send him to take on a job in another town, though, the boys begin to go astray. "His established routine of composure, obedience, study, and compulsory siesta-long a pattern of our daily existence-gradually lost its grip...Then we broke free." The boys bunk off school and head down to the river to fish.
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