Chigozie Obioma channels Homer in a new Nigerian epic
WITHOUT MEANING TO, CHIGOZIE OBIOMA FELL in love with tragedies. As a child in Akure, Nigeria, he devoured Greek myths at the library; plucked Shakespeare plays from his father’s shelves; and absorbed cautionary folktales from the southeastern Igbo tribe, passed down by his mother. If there was a common thread, it was an obsession with fate—often the distinctly gloomy kind. “I must have internalized
