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Featured on “Best of 2008” Lists from:
San Francisco Chronicle
Kirkus Reviews
The Christian Science Monitor
The Wall Street Journal
People
Entertainment Weekly (named “#1 Fiction Book of the Year”)
Bloomberg News
The Washington Post Book World
NPR’s “Fresh Air”
“[A] startling debut collection... Akpan is not striving for surreal effects. He is summoning miseries that are real…. He fuses a knowledge of African poverty and strife with a conspicuously literary approach to storytelling filtering tales of horror through the wide eyes of the young.”
“Uwem Akpan’s brilliant Say You’re One of Them proves that great fiction often can reveal more truth than a whole shelf of memoirs and histories. Akpan’s subtle, compassionate presentation of his characters—good and bad—makes them individuals. He never allows the bloodshed and degradation they suffer to overwhelm their humanity or their humor and quirkiness…. This is an important and gifted writer who should be read.”
“Like Flannery O’Connor’s best work, [these stories] absorb any light you project upon them; Akpan’s characters are wrapped in the hard-edge, inscrutable armor of people in situations so desperate that superhuman instincts take over…Akpan is such a clever, instinctual writer, that even when his characters are providing testimony, it can feel like art…These stories are complex, full of respect for the characters facing depravity, free of sensationalizing or glib judgments. They are dispatches from a journey, Akpan makes clear, which has only begun. It is to their credit that grim as they are—you cannot but hope these tales have a sequel.”
“Searing…In the end, the most enduring image of these disturbing, beautiful and hopeful stories is that of slipping away. Children disappear into the anonymous blur of the big city or into the darkness of the all-encompassing bush. One can only hope that they survive to live another day and tell another tale.”
“It is not merely the subject that makes Akpan’s…writing so astonishing, translucent, and horrifying all at once; it is his talent with metaphor and imagery, his immersion into character and place….Uwem Akpan has given these children their voices, and for the compassion and art in his stories I am grateful and changed.”
“Akpan’s brilliance is to present a brutal subject through the bewildered, resolutely chipper voice of children…All five of these stories are electrifying.”
“With this heart-stopping collection, which includes the New Yorker piece, &ldquoAn Ex-Mas Feast,” that marked Akpan as a breakout talent, the Nigerian-born Jesuit priest relentlessly personalizes the unstable social conditions of sub-Saharan Africa…. The stories are lifted above consciousness-raising shockers by Akpan’s sure characterizations, understated details, and culturally specific dialect.”
“Stories that are as shocking as they are delicate.”
“Well-crafted and chilling…a must-read for anyone interested in the fate of modern Africa and the world.”
“Awe is the only appropriate response to Uwem Akpan's stunning debut, Say You're One of Them, a collection of five stories so ravishing and sad that I regret ever wasting superlatives on fiction that was merely very good….Akpan's characters are ordinary, flawed, sometimes funny kids who happen to be caught in a nightmare…. The book should be depressing, but the blazing humanity of the characters and the brilliance of Akpan's artistry make this one of the year's most exhilarating reads. A.”
-Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly (EW Pick / Grade A)
“In the corrupt, war-ravaged Africa of this starkly beautiful debut collection, identity is shifting, never to be trusted…Akpan's people, and the dreamlike horror of the worlds they reveal, are impossible to forget.”
“Say You’re One of Them is astonishing, triumphantly unique. The stories flow with an eerie Chekhovian ease and understatement—the horrors are evoked with a matter-of-factness that is devastating, and the characters’ memories and inner lives are always more real than the appalling events occurring around them. Uwem Akpan has moral greatness—you can never again put out of your mind what he has taken you firmly by the hand to get a close look at. The startling newness of his language gives us no choice but to listen.”
“From the most impoverished, war-ravaged continent comes this strong, brave offering from Uwem Akpan, a Jesuit priest. No news report or documentary evokes the desperate straits of the African people so keenly. Like Isaac Babel's Red Calvary stories and Michael Herr's Dispatches, Say You're One of Them has invented a new language—both for horror and the relentless persistence of light in war-torn countries. I can't shake this book, and shouldn't.”
“Say You’re One of Them is a beautiful, bitter, compelling read. The savagely strange juxtapositions in these stories are grounded by the loving relationships between brothers and sisters forced to survive in a world of dreamlike horror. Open the book at any page, as in divination, and a stunning sentence will leap out. Newspaper facts are molded by Akpan’s sure touch into fictional works of great power.”
“Say You’re One of Them is one of those collections that drops the reader into the midst of wonderfully rendered worlds, and compellingly so. I hope it finds the wide readership it merits.”
“Here is a truly unforgettable book. Say You’re One of Them is an important, well-crafted, and ultimately devastating collection, and Akpan is a writer of rare gifts and deeply humane vision. I can’t recommend these stories more highly.”
“Say You’re One of Them is not only good advice for surviving ethnic conflict; it’s also, in Uwem Akpan’s hands, an exercise in empathetic speculation--an exercise that, in this collection’s case, seems nearly sacramental in the sobriety and miraculousness of its reach. Repeatedly these stories quietly enable us to imagine the unimaginable, and offer up to our view the unspeakable rendered with clarity and grace.”
“Say You’re One of Them gives voice to Africa’s children in beautifully crafted prose and stunning detail. Uwem Akpan is a major new literary talent.”
“Uwem Akpan writes with a political fierceness and a humanity so full of compassion it might just change the world. His is a burning talent.”
“Uwem Akpan’s stories are extraordinary not just for the sheer power of their narratives and the sympathy and affection he lavishes on his child protagonists, but also for their importance in communicating the chaotic, strife-ridden world of Africa today. What an original, graceful, and necessary talent Akpan is!”
“Haunting prose…. A must-read.”
“Nigerian-born Jesuit priest Akpan transports the reader into gritty scenes of chaos and fear in his rich debut collection… Akpan’s prose is beautiful and his stories are insightful and revealing, made even more harrowing because all the horror—and there is much—is seen through the eyes of children.”
“Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit priest, has said he was inspired to write by the ‘humor and endurance of the poor,’ and his debut story collection…about the gritty lives of African children – speaks to the fearsome, illuminating truth of that impulse.”
“The humor, the endurance, the horrors and grace—Akpan has captured all of it…. The stories are not only amazing and moving, and imbued with a powerful moral courage—they are also surprisingly expert…. Beautifully constructed, stately in a way that offsets their impoverished scenarios. Akpan wants you to see and feel Africa, its glory and its pain. And you do, which makes this an extraordinary book.”
“Uwem Akpan’s searing Say You’re One of Them captures a ravaged Africa through the dry-eyed gaze of children trying to maintain a sense of normalcy amid chaos.”
“An important literary debut…. Juxtaposed against the clarity and revelation in Akpan’s prose—as translucent a style as I’ve read in a long while—we find subjects that nearly render the mind helpless and throw the heart into a hopeless erratic rhythm out of fear, out of pity, out of the shame of being only a few degrees of separation removed from these monstrous modern circumstances…The reader discovers that no hiding place is good enough with these stories battering at your mind and heart.”
“Uwem Akpan’s stunning short story collection, Say You’re One of Them, offers a richer, more nuanced view of Africa than the one we often see on the news….Akpan never lets us forget that the resilient youngsters caught up in these extraordinary circumstances are filled with their own hopes and dreams, even as he assuredly illuminates the harsh realities.”
“African writer and Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan depicts the plight of African children with the kind of restraint only possible when an author fully inhabits his characters—he manages to be empathetic without being condescending.”