Imagine a patient, observant and precise writer like the late W.G. Sebald reborn as a Nigerian exile, returning to and then wandering about that country’s teeming and chaotic cultural capital, Lagos. That, in broad strokes, is the voice of the narrator of Teju Cole‘s fine novel, Every Day Is for the Thief.
“The air in the strange environment of this city is dense with story, and it draws me into thinking of life as stories,” Cole’s unnamed narrator says halfway through the novel, as he becomes more deeply immersed in the disorder, the striving, the corruption and the inventiveness of Lagos and its people. “The narratives fly at me from all directions … And that literary texture of lives full of unpredictable narrative, is what appeals.”
Cole earned a large following in the United States for his PEN Faulkner Award-winning Open City, published in 2011. That novel told the story of a Nigerian immigrant and his wanderings in New York City and other places. The U.S.-born Cole was raised and educated in Nigeria. Before he wrote Open City, he had written Every Day Is for the Thief, his first book, published in Nigeria in 2007, and which Random House is now issuing in the United States for the first time.