Helon Habila, Waiting for an Angel, 2005

The first story in this linked collection won the 2001 Caine Prize for African writing: a short tale about Lomba, a Nigerian journalist and political prisoner who finds himself writing love poetry, Cyrano-like, to the inept Prison Superintendent’s girlfriend. Habila went back to this character to flesh out a history and chart how he went from a girl-obsessed, soul music-loving arts correspondent to having his eyes opened by the brutality of the Abacha regime of the 1990s. A grim and depressing realism provides the detailed background which, without its roll-call of impressively idiosyncratic characters, would otherwise make this a hard book to like.  PY

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