A Particular Kind
of Black Man

A life between places.
A self taking shape.

Tunde Akinola grows up in Utah, the son of Nigerian immigrants, caught between his father’s American dream and his own need to belong. After his mother returns to Nigeria, he searches for connection in family, religion, friendship, and the shifting communities of his childhood and young adulthood.

As Tunde reckons with the life he remembers, the novel asks how identity is made—and what happens when the stories we inherit no longer contain us.

“A study of the particulate self, the self as a constellation of moving parts.”

The New York Times Book Review