'Goodbye Lucille' - Best 1st Book

2005 Caine winner and author of the short story collection A Life Elsewhere, Segun Afolabi, last week won this year's Authors' Club Best First Novel Award for his debut novel Goodbye Lucille, published this month in Vintage paperback. Afolabi collected the £1000 award at The Arts Club in London's Mayfair. Chair of judges, writer & publisher Carmen Callil, said of Afolabi, "His voice reaches out and after I read Goodbye Lucille it lingered in my thoughts. I'm sure he will go on to make a big contribution to literature."

Excerpt from Goodbye Lucille
‘This highway, where my parents died. They were driving the same way. Look! Look at that man!’ I pointed. A Medusa-haired wanderer meandered along the centre of the road, naked. He carried no belongings. The filthy matted hair that hung down his back and face seemed his only accessory. The driver braked and swerved to avoid him. As we overtook him we could see his skin, painted with dust. His mouth moved rapidly.

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New Reads

Excerpts from winning stories in the Bath Spa University (BSU)/BOAC Creative Writing Competition for Nigerian writers – judged by BSU and Caine winner Segun Afolabi.

Winner – Ngozi Ifeyinwa Razak-Soyebi with a novel excerpt, The Whip – which begins in shocking fashion, with a woman mercilessly assaulting her housemaid with a horsewhip. We come to realise that the abuser was herself the victim of vicious assaults at the hands of her own mother.

By now, Mother is a like ticking bomb just waiting to explode. ‘So none of you stole the cake from the fridge, eh?’ she bellows. ‘Would you rather have me think that a ghost wandered into the house while we were all asleep, realized we had some cake left in the fridge and decided to help itself to some?’
Mother often speaks like that, conjuring up images of impossible scenarios into a serious situation. Of course no matter how much you long to laugh, you can’t because you are so intensely aware of the seriousness of the situation and afraid your bowels might give way any time soon.

Read “The Whip”...

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Runner Up – Adeboyin Thomas with “The World is a Bubble” – a story of love, jealousy and tradition. It is a testament to how good Thomas’ story is, that it did so well in the competition despite the many punctuation opportunities missed.

Arit looked hopefully at the entrance of her tent; she hoped John would come. It was true what the man said about screaming. It could work either way. People could come in and chase the man away or they could draw negative conclusions and the village of Oron did not forgive a ruined reputation easily. At her age and in her position, she couldn’t afford any stain on her reputation. It was bad enough to be encumbered by the shackles of tradition that bound every virgin in the village but for a virgin of the priestly lineage, the weight of the shackles was heavier. Afam followed the movement of her eyes. He wondered jealously who she was expecting.

Read “The World is a Bubble”... (I never did get the relevance of the title, but lovely, lovely story).

On Afolabi's 'Goodbye Lucille'

Excerpt from Toyin Akinosho's Artsville Column...

Goodbye Lucille - Is This The Same Writer?
Segun Afolabi's Monday Morning, the short story which delivered the Caine Prize to him in 2005, feels like a slow, tentative story of an immigrant uncertain of his new space. With another deliberative short story in The Obituary Tango, an anthology of Caine Prize entries, it is easy to assume that Afolabi would come to be known as a "soft", carefully measured stylist. The publisher Muhtar Bakare actually describes the Kaduna born scribe as "restrained and.. subtle". But first impressions aren't always a complete take. Afolabi's just published first novel, Goodbye Lucille, about another immigrant in Europe, begins with a furious pace, such that four distinct characters had shown up by the second page; Vincent, the struggling photographer who is at the heart of the story; his girlfriend Lucille who he left behind in London to hustle in Berlin; Marie, the magazine editor and Henrich Henkleman, the politician whose murder sets much of the tone of this 308 page narrative. And in less than 1,000 words, all of these characters are already sufficiently described we can picture what they are. Farafina's decision to publish Goodbye Lucille is in sync with its tradition of seeking out Nigerian winners in publishing houses in Europe and America and giving them audience at home. The same principle informs the company's release of the Nigerian version of Biyi Bandele's Burma Boy and much earlier, Chimamanda Adichie's Half Of A Yellow Sun. Such strategy certainly serves a socially responsible purpose; a growing tribe of Nigerian writers live and write abroad and they are getting the attention of European and American critics as they beat western writers hands down in contest for some of the most important literary awards. But it is easy for these authors not to be known in their home country, as the publishing houses don't think very highly of having outlets in the supposedly dark continent. To the extent that most of these stories are essentially Nigerian, Farafina fulfils the need of letting the home audience get more than a glimpse into life in the diaspora. In November, these sort of stories will form the basis for a panel discussion: Writing In: Tales From The Diaspora, which will feature readings, reviews and discussions around Afolabi's Monday Morning, Biyi Bandele's The Street, Chimamanda Adichie's That Thing Around Your Neck, Diana Evans' 26A, Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl and Diran Adebayo's Some Kind Of Black. This conversation is one of the main events of the 9th Lagos Book And Art Festival, holding at the National Theatre from November 9-11.

Bandele on Goodbye Lucille

Segun Afolabi's first novel, Goodbye Lucille, is now out in the UK by Jonathan Cape. The novel was reviewed by fellow Nigerian Biyi Bandele in last Saturday's Guardian Review. Bandele, playwright and author of The Street, was born in Northern Nigeria to Yoruba parents from the Southwest - like Afolabi.

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Caine winner Afolabi's collection of short stories, A Life Elsewhere, was published in 2006. And Bandele's second novel, Burma Boy, will be published this summer.

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Bandele's review of Goodbye Lucille here.