The liquid eye of a moon

Fifteen-year-old Dimkpa dreams of the day his father will be made village head. He will return to school and maybe even go on to university; his mother will no longer have to break her back foraging wild food to sell at market; they will have the money to build a fine tomb for his aunt Okike; and his family’s status as ohu ma, the lowest Igbo caste, won’t matter anymore. But when his father is passed over for a younger man, breaking tradition, Dimkpa realises that he must make his own fate. A Nigerian ‘Catcher in the Rye’, Uchenna Awoke’s debut breaks the silence about a hidden and dangerous contemporary caste system.