IMG_20150203_212327Guess what was on my doorstep when I got back home from the gym sometime last night. This House Is Not for Sale: A Novel by E. C. Osondu!

It was released yesterday and now it’s on my nightstand 🙂

Am I excited to dig in? Yes.

It’s been a tough but fruitful week with dissertation writing—the other love of my life—which also means that come Friday evening, I’ll be officially dead to any kind of hard-core intellectual thought.

No worries, though, ’cause it’ll be time to soak up my exhausted mind in some African fiction goodness. I hear Osondu’s first novel is a lovely story featuring an ensemble of strange, larger-than-life characters all clustered around this one house in an African neighborhood.

I know Osondu from 2009 when he won the Caine Prize for African Writing, but some how I never got to read his short story collection, Voice of America. Happy I’m getting to catch up with him this time around.

Can’t say I’m blown away by the cover. But I am intrigued by the length of the book: 182 pages with big type—meaning short and petite. I’ve always interpreted the petiteness of a book as a mark of literary confidence, like the book is saying, “I don’t have to say too much to blow your mind away.”

Ha ha ha. Just found out Osondu’s full name. Now know what the E. C. in E. C. Osondu stands for. Oh dear! We’ll just stick to the initials 🙂