THIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE

182pp., paperback, London, 2015

A novel set in a large house in a working-class Nigerian neighbourhood, about an extraordinary family and their community, seen through the eyes of a young child.

"...the kind of storytelling that does not want or need the kind of emotional investment that many other novels are desperate to attract... a collection of semi-fantastic modern urban tales that don’t quite work (that aren’t meant to work, I mean); that get jammed at some crucial point and then fall apart or stop, leaving the reader sometimes pleasantly confused, but never patronised or overloaded. They don’t ask much of us; there are no outright impossibilities or violations of the laws of physics. More a sense of the marvellous embedded within the texture of daily life, which is itself a more accurate rendering of the Latin American lo real maravilloso — the marvellous real." Hedley Twidle, Financial Times

EC Osondu was born in Nigeria. He won the 2009 Caine Prize for African Writing. He currently teaches at Providence College, Rhode Island. His first book, the short story collection Voice of America, was published in 2011.