Helon Habila’s fifth book and fourth novel will arrive in June 2019, from Penguin Random House imprint Hamish Hamilton. Titled Travellers, the 320-page book follows the novels Waiting for an Angel (2002), Measuring Time (2007) and Oil on Water (2011), and the nonfiction book The Chibok Girls (2016).
A professor of creative writing at George Mason University, Habila is a recipient of the Caine Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize.
His new novel Travellers is a life-changing encounter with those who have been uprooted by war or aspiration, fear or hope.
A Nigerian graduate student who has made his home in America knows what it means to strike out for new shores.
When his wife proposes that he accompanies her to Berlin, where she has been awarded a prestigious art fellowship, he has his reservations: “I knew every departure is death, every return a rebirth. Most changes happen unplanned, and they always leave a scar.”
A statement obtained from his Amazon page says Travelers is a “startlingly imaginative exploration of the African diaspora in Europe, by one of our most acclaimed international writers.”
Here is a description of Travellers from Penguin.
Poignant and beautifully sculpted, a novel about exile, identity and the many kinds of travellers moving through our modern world.
Modern Europe is a melting pot of migrating souls: among them a Nigerian American couple on a prestigious arts fellowship, a transgender film student seeking the freedom of authenticity, a Libyan doctor who lost his wife and child in the waters of the Mediterranean, and a Somali shopkeeper trying to save his young daughter from forced marriage. And, though the divide between the self-chosen exiles and those who are forced to leave home may feel solid, in reality such boundaries are endlessly shifting and frighteningly soluble.
Moving from a Berlin nightclub to a Sicilian refugee camp to the London apartment of a Malawian poet, Helon Habila evokes a rich mosaic of migrant experiences. And through his characters’ interconnecting fates, he traces the extraordinary pilgrimages we all might make in pursuit of home.
Congratulations to Helon Habila.
Get Travellers on Amazon.