Every Day Is for the Thief
Teju Cole's first novel, originally published in Nigeria in 2007 and reissued by Random House in 2014, is a slim, photograph-laced fictional travelogue. An unnamed narrator, a Nigerian-born psychiatrist who has lived in New York for fifteen years, flies home to Lagos for a family visit. Across twenty-six brief chapters he moves through a city of corrupt customs officers, internet cafe scammers, traffic-jam preachers, missing power, and unexpected pockets of beauty, a museum where a guard pulls a switchblade, a bookstore that smells right, a music store full of bootleg Fela. Cole's narrator is half ethnographer, half mourner, pulled simultaneously toward and away from the country he left. A foundational work of contemporary African diaspora writing and a quiet companion piece to his celebrated novel Open City.
What you might want to know about Every Day Is for the Thief
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A Nigerian American narrator returns to Lagos for the first time in many years and walks the city, the airport queue, the cyber cafe, the danfo bus, the cousins, taking notes and quiet photographs as he goes.
Every Day Is for the Thief was written by Teju Cole, originally published in Nigeria in 2007 and reissued internationally in 2014. It is a hybrid novel-photo essay about a Nigerian-American narrator returning to Lagos.
Every Day Is for the Thief is fiction, but it is so closely modeled on Teju Cole's own travels in Lagos that many readers approach it as autobiographical fiction. The narrator is unnamed and shares many of the author's biographical details.
Every Day Is for the Thief is 162 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Every Day Is for the Thief takes most readers 2 to 4 hours to finish.
Every Day Is for the Thief is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Every Day Is for the Thief is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
