‘Exudes a wonderfully vivid sense of place and leads the reader inside the head of its teenage hero’ IAN RANKIN

'I fell in love immediately... Hilarious' MAX PORTER

Fifteen-year-old Andrew Aziza lives in Kontagora, Nigeria, where his days are spent about town with his droogs, Slim and Morocca, grappling with his fantasies about white girls – especially blondes – and wondering who his father is. When he’s not in church, at school or attempting to form ‘Africa’s first superheroes’, he obsesses over mathematical theorems, ideas of black power and HXVX: the Curse of Africa.

Sure enough, the reluctantly nicknamed ‘Andy Africa’ soon falls hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on, Eileen. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. An unfamiliar man claims, despite his mother’s denials, to be Andy’s father, and the gathering of an anti-Christian mob is headed for the church – both set to shake the foundations of everything Andy knows and loves.

Introducing an extraordinary new literary talent, The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa provides a stunning lens into contemporary African life, the relentless infiltration of Western culture and, most of all, the ordinary but impossible challenges of coming of age in a turbulent world.