HANGMAN

198pp., paperback, Reprint, One, London, (2023) 2024

ISBN: 9781911590798

Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A man returns to his homeland in sub-Saharan Africa after 26 years in exile in the USA to visit his ailing brother.

" A slim, stark, and captivatingly enigmatic début novel ... The expectation for an American novel about an African immigrant is that it will perform a task of translation: here is where I come from, and these are the painful circumstances under which I left. Hangman, with its sphinxlike style, turns a mirror on these demands ...One given that Hangman questions is exiles’ authority to pronounce upon the places they leave ...Binyam's narrator, like the Biblical Adam doubling back toward Eden, finds the fruits despoiled and the gates barred against him." Julian Lukas,  The New Yorker

“Hangman is a gripping story of homecoming and loss, of recuperation and letting go, all of it told in a voice that is at turns ruthlessly honest and startlingly beautiful. Maya Binyam is an immensely gifted writer and every page of this deeply moving novel offers us compelling and hard-earned truths. But what remains by the end is something that resembles a loving gesture from a long-lost relative: necessary and seismic, profound and unforgettable.”
Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

Maya Binyam's work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at the Paris Review, previously worked as an editor at Triple Canopy and the New Inquiry, and lectured at the New School's Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism programme. She lives in Los Angeles. Hangman is her debut novel.