Join author and Booker Prize Foundation Scholar Stephen Buoro to celebrate the publication of his debut novel The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa.

Fifteen-year-old Andrew Aziza lives in Kontagora, Nigeria, where his days are spent about town with his droogs, Slim and Morocca, grappling with his fantasies about white girls – especially blondes – and wondering who his father is. When he’s not in church, at school or attempting to form ‘Africa’s first superheroes’, he obsesses over mathematical theorems, ideas of black power and HXVX: the Curse of Africa.

Sure enough, the reluctantly nicknamed ‘Andy Africa’ soon falls hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on, Eileen. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. An unfamiliar man claims, despite his mother’s denials, to be Andy’s father, and the gathering of an anti-Christian mob is headed for the church – both set to shake the foundations of everything Andy knows and loves.

Stephen’s debut novel is profound, exhilarating and highly original. In conversation for this very special virtual event, he will discuss his inspirations for this tragicomic novel and the journey involved in writing it. The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa is a dazzling portrayal of the contemporary African ‘condition’, the relentless infiltration of Western Culture, and the ordinary but impossible challenges of coming of age in a turbulent world. Make sure you tune in.

I fell in love immediately…Eccentric, profound, timely, specific; it has global concerns and a really, really brilliant central character. Max Porter

A blazing debut - smart, subversive, funny, heartbreaking. I’m already impatient for Buoro’s next book. Kamila Shamsie