UNDER THE UDALA TREES

328pp., paperback, Reprint, London, (2016) 2017

A novel set in Nigeria about a young woman born before independence who, sent away to safety when the civil war breaks out, meets and falls in love with another displaced child from a different ethnic community. They are also both girls.

"A unique and devastatingly hopeful story about the paradox of love: even in the midst of war, and in a world dominated by violence and prejudice, still, love transcends." Mia Couto, author of Confession of the Lioness

Chinelo Okparanta was born in 1981 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. At the age of 10, she emigrated to the United States with her family. She is a winner of a 2014 Lambda Literary Award, a 2016 Lambda Literary Award, the 2016 Jessie Redmon Fauset Book Award in Fiction, the 2016 Inaugural Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle, and a 2014 O. Henry Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she currently lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University. She is the author of the short story collection, Happiness, Like Water.