Winner of the Whiting Award for Fiction
Living in small-town Utah has always been an uneasy fit for Tunde Akinola’s family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he can’t escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black won’t come off. As he struggles to fit in and find his place in the world, he finds little solace from his parents who are grappling with their own issues.
Tunde’s father, ever the optimist, works tirelessly chasing his American dream while his wife, lonely in Utah without family and friends, sinks deeper into schizophrenia. Then one otherwise-ordinary morning, Tunde’s mother wakes him with a hug, bundles him and his baby brother into the car, and takes them away from the only home they’ve ever known.
But running away doesn’t bring her, or her children, any relief from the demons that plague her; once Tunde’s father tracks them down, she flees to Nigeria, and Tunde never feels at home again. He spends the rest of his childhood and young adulthood searching for connection—to the wary stepmother and stepbrothers he gains when his father remarries; to the Utah residents who mock his father’s accent; to evangelical religion; to his Texas middle school’s crowd of African-Americans; to the fraternity brothers of his historically black college. In so doing, he discovers something that sends him on a journey away from everything he has known.
Sweeping, stirring, and perspective-shifting, A Particular Kind of Black Man is a beautiful and poignant exploration of the meaning of memory, manhood, home, and identity as seen through the eyes of a first-generation Nigerian-American.
Praise For A Particular Kind of Black Man
"Wild, vulnerable, lived…A study of the particulate self, the self as a constellation of moving parts.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A Particular Kind of Black Man is an audacious debut, a book that is many things at once: a profound immigration narrative, a moving coming of age story, and an appraisal and defense of the novel as an essential 21st-century art form. The structure—fluid, slippery, a suspended chord in search of resolution—echoes the journey of the protagonist, and, indeed, of America. In these brilliant, searing, heartbreaking and hopeful pages, Tope Folarin has given us a novel that many of us will revisit for years to come."
—Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank and Rails Under My Back
"Tope Folarin's A Particular Kind of Black Man stopped me dead in my tracks and consumed my day in a helpless trance. One feels as if someone else's mirror has appeared, and the longer one stares into it, the more something reflected becomes...oneself. A radical act.”
—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
"Deeply observed and abundant with strange poetry, Folarin's novel charts a terrifying and radiant journey of growing up in an identity and family that is perpetually in flux. I tore through this book as if in a fever dream... its uncanny reality remained with me long after it was over."
—Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart
"Arresting and insightful, Folarin's A Particular Kind of Black Man is one of those books that refuses to let you go till the very end. Tunde's world - broken and alive, vivid and painful - bursts from these pages with unforgettable honesty and heart. This is a story about exiles and departures, about the continual search for what has been in front of us all along. A gripping, achingly beautiful debut."
—Maaza Mengiste, author of Beneath the Lion's Gaze