About 20 pages into this novel I realised that I had never read anything like this. It was a kind of magical realism, a kind of folklore, a kind of spiritualism. I didn’t know if I was reading an existential novel or about demon possession. A coming-of-age novel like no other coming-of-age I had ever encountered. And I liked it.

Sometimes I read what is called literary or experimental and it’s just too far out there for me. I don’t understand what is happening and therefore cannot enjoy it. That wasn’t the case with this book. I didn’t always understand what I was reading but it was rooted in enough realism and written with enough honesty to for me to just swim along with the tide and hope we all made it to the same destination at the same time.

The copy I have contains an essay by Emezi first published on BuzzFeed Reader. I highly recommend reading this essay. In it, Emezi speaks of looking and failing to find work by authors of colour that were similar to what she was writing in her debut. She writes about finding similarities in the work of Nabokov but feeling unworthy to make such a claim. She explains that this text is not just about identity but about metaphysical identity and speaks of how this novel is routed in some of her own realities.

This is a novel that is deeply routed in Igbo traditions and realities and yet very uniquely the authors own. It contains a large cast of Ogbanje, which I first learned of in Things Fall Apart, and other Igbo gods. There are also lots of Igbo words and phrases used without a translation accompaniment. You might need to go do some extra research after reading this, which I don’t think is a bad thing. I may be Nigerian but each tribe comes with its own set of gods, traditions and beliefs. My tribe is Ibibio and I was raised in the UK. I had to do some further exploring too.

Warning label: it contains sexual assault, heavy violence, suicide and self-harm. It also forces the reader to look at these things through a non-Western lens, something that is very rare. Although I disagreed with the portrayal of a Christ character, I was deeply impressed by the way in which, like no other book, I was completely subsumed into the internal world of the main character; a character who for most of the book behaves as a secondary character.

This book is like no other and, in my opinion, something like a work of art.