The Reverend’s Apprentice
A powerful, tragicomic novel about power, culture, and identity politics in contemporary America, as seen through the eyes of an African student. Jonah Ayot is a graduate student from a fictional central African nation, studying in a fictional American city some time after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003; the novel mirrors Jonah’s own struggle as a newcomer to American life, trying to organize his perceptions around an identity that is global rather than parochial.
But those perceptions become muddied in the reality of the new war zone—on American soil, where the foreign becomes familiar, and the familiar is no longer what it used to be.
David Nandi Odhiambo is a Canadian novelist and writer born in Kenya.
Other publications from this author include:
- I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter (2018)
- Smells Like Stars (2018)
- Brother (2017)
- Soucouyant (2007)
- “‘The Fiction of Belonging’: On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada” in Callaloo, 30 (3), 818-829 (2007)
- “Postcolonial Diasporas” in Postcolonial Text, 2 (1) (2006)
- Kipligat’s Chance (2003)
- “‘Canada in Us Now’: Locating the Criticism of Black Canadian Writing” in Essays on Canadian Writing, 75, 196-216 (2002)
- Diss/ed banded nation (1998)