The Road to the Country

In 1967, as the Biafran War breaks out, Kunle is a young Yoruba university student in Lagos who carries fifteen years of guilt over the childhood accident that crippled his younger brother Tunde. When Tunde, who has been living in the East with an Igbo family, goes missing at the war's outset, Kunle crosses into Biafra to find him and is accidentally conscripted into the Biafran army. He spends three years as an infantryman watching the secession collapse, while a Seer in the spirit world tracks the prophesied journey of his soul. Obioma writes the war chapters with unflinching ground-level detail and frames the realism inside an Igbo cosmology.