Uzodinma Iweala

'Elegant and elegiac' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Guardian 'A writer of spectacular talent' Observer On the surface, Niru leads a charmed life. Raised by two attentive parents in Washington, DC, he's a top student and a track star at his prestigious private high school. Bound for Harvard, his prospects are bright. But Niru has a painful secret: he is queer - an abominable sin to his conservative Nigerian parents. No one knows except his best friend, Meredith - the one person who seems not to judge him. When his father accidentally finds out, the fallout is brutal and swift. Coping with troubles of her own, however, Meredith finds that she has little left emotionally to offer him. As the two friends struggle to reconcile their desires against the expectations and institutions that seek to define them, they find themselves speeding towards a future more violent and senseless than they can imagine. Neither will escape unscathed. Speak No Evil is a novel about the power of words and self-identification, about who gets to speak and who has the power to speak for other people.

Speak No Evil

Winner of the American Library Association’s Barbara Gittings Literature Award | An Indie Next Pick | A Barnes and Noble Best Book of the Month | A Library Journal Best Book of the Year "A lovely slender volume that packs in entire worlds with complete mastery. Speak No Evil explains so much about our times and yet is never anything less than a scintillating, page-turning read."—Gary Shteyngart "A wrenching, tightly woven story about many kinds of love and many kinds of violence. Speak No Evil probes deeply but also with compassion the cruelties of a loving home. Iweala’s characters confront you in close-up, as viscerally, bodily alive as any in contemporary fiction."—Larissa MacFarquhar In the long-anticipated novel from the author of the critically acclaimed Beasts of No Nation, a revelation shared between two privileged teenagers from very different backgrounds sets off a chain of events with devastating consequences. On the surface, Niru leads a charmed life. Raised by two attentive parents in Washington, D.C., he’s a top student and a track star at his prestigious private high school. Bound for Harvard in the fall, his prospects are bright. But Niru has a painful secret: he is queer—an abominable sin to his conservative Nigerian parents. No one knows except Meredith, his best friend, the daughter of prominent Washington insiders—and the one person who seems not to judge him. When his father accidentally discovers Niru is gay, the fallout is brutal and swift. Coping with troubles of her own, however, Meredith finds that she has little left emotionally to offer him. As the two friends struggle to reconcile their desires against the expectations and institutions that seek to define them, they find themselves speeding toward a future more violent and senseless than they can imagine. Neither will escape unscathed. In the tradition of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Speak No Evil explores what it means to be different in a fundamentally conformist society and how that difference plays out in our inner and outer struggles. It is a novel about the power of words and self-identification, about who gets to speak and who has the power to speak for other people. As heart-wrenching and timely as his breakout debut, Beasts of No Nation, Uzodinma Iweala’s second novel cuts to the core of our humanity and leaves us reeling in its wake. A 2018 Indie Next Pick | A Barnes and Noble Best Book of the Month | A Library Journal Best Book of 2018 | One of The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of 2018 | One of Bustle’s 35 Most Anticipated Fiction Books Of 2018 | One of Paste's 25 Most Anticipated Books of 2018 | One of The Boston Globe’s 25 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018

A Novel

Moray Lyle McIntosh

It is certainly a devastating story of homophobia and racism and identity with a tragic end that is in no doubt from the very beginning. It's a powerful story and an important one that tackles violence and prejudice and the consequences of making our own feelings and desires more important than those of others. I wouldn't dream of disputing any of these facts, they're basically incontestable (or should be). My problem lies with the very factor that has sent other reviewers into rhapsodies, and that is the writing. It's highly stylized, with little punctuation and a free-form structure that breaks down and challenges usual reading practice - so far so good, I love experimental writing, whatever barrier you want to break I'm right there with you. But it had to be effective (and affective), it has to work. And this just didn't work for me at all. 

The prose developed an overbearing cadence that made it feel repetitive and sucked all the life out of the characters and events. Intellectually I could acknowledge the terrible tragedy but by the time events emerged the prose had sapped all emotion from me but irritation by blurring both people and places, the writing just swept the actual story away and buried it so that it could hardly be understood let alone felt. It also created a very childlike tone, and while the characters are young the writing felt like the unadorned recitation of a much younger person, an endless procession of and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened without pause for breath or thought or significant development. In the end it was a case of style over substance, the substance is there in the hard-hitting events but the style meant that it was just barely skimmed.

Speak No Evil

Reviews