- Random House Trade Paperbacks.
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY DWIGHT GARNER, THE
NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San
Francisco Chronicle | NPR | The Root | The Telegraph | The Globe
and Mail
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • FINALIST, PHILLIS WHEATLEY BOOK AWARD •
TEJU COLE WAS NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL AFRICANS OF THE
YEAR BY NEW AFRICAN MAGAZINE
For readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Michael Ondaatje,
Every Day Is for the Thief is a wholly original work of fiction
by Teju Cole, whose critically accled debut, Open City, was
the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the best
books of the year by more than twenty publications.
Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels
longer still because I left under a cloud.
A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for
a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a
city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a
mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He
witnesses the “yahoo yahoo” diligently perpetrating email frauds
from an Internet café, longs after a mysterious woman reading on
a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd,
and recalls the tragic e of an eleven-year-old boy accused of
stealing at a local market.
Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former
girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos
life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—and slowly begins to
reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his
country and the truth about himself.
In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven
with original photos by the author, Every Day Is for the
Thief—originally published in Nigeria in 2007—is a wholly
original work of fiction. This revised and updated edition is the
first version of this unique book to be made available outside
Africa. You’ve never read a book like Every Day Is for the Thief
because no one writes like Teju Cole.
Praise for Every Day Is for the Thief
“A luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and
return . . . extraordinary.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Cole is following in a long tradition of writerly walkers who,
in the tradition of Baudelaire, make their way through urban
spaces on foot and take their time doing so. Like Alfred Kazin,
Joseph Mitchell, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (with whom he is
often compared), Cole adds to the literature in his own
zeitgeisty fashion.”—The Boston Globe
“Crisp, affecting . . . Cole constructs a narrative of fragments,
a series of episodes that he allows to resonate.”—The New York
Times Book Review
“Hugely rewarding . . . both a celebration of one of the world’s
most vibrant cities and a lament over what can be one of the most
frustrating and difficult places to live. It is also a story of
family breakup and an uneasy homecoming—the narrator has been
away for fifteen years and must relearn how to navigate a place
that was once home.”—NPR
“[Every Day Is for the Thief has] a restraint that allows [Cole]
to slip in these exquisitely rendered observations on life, love,
art that leave you feeling richer and more attuned to your own
reality once you’ve finished reading.”—Dinaw Mengestu, The
Atlantic
From the Hardcover edition.