Poet, journalist, and musician Musa Okwonga, has a new novel out!

Titled In The End, It Was All About Love, Okwonga’s book is based on his experiences living in Berlin. It is about his “love-hate-love relationship” with the city, his bizarre encounters with its inhabitants, and more.

Here’s a summary of the book from its publisher, Rough Trade Books:

The narrator arrives in Berlin, a place famed for its hedonism, to find peace and maybe love; only to discover that the problems which have long haunted him have arrived there too, and are more present than ever. As he approaches his fortieth birthday, nearing the age where his father was killed in a brutal revolution, he drifts through this endlessly addictive and sometimes mystical city, through its slow days and bottomless nights, wondering whether he will ever escape the damage left by his father’s death. With the world as a whole more uncertain, as both the far-right and global temperatures rise at frightening speed, he finds himself fighting a fierce inner battle against his turbulent past, for a future free of his fear of failure, of persecution, and of intimacy.

In The End, It Was All About Love is a journey of loss and self-acceptance that takes its nameless narrator all the way through bustling Berlin to his roots, a quiet village on the Uganda-Sudan border. It is a bracingly honest story of love, sexuality and spirituality, of racism, dating, and alienation; of fleeing the greatest possible pain, and of the hopeful road home.

Okwonga shared an excerpt of the beginning of the book on Twitter:

On Instagram, Okwonga also shared another excerpt on what he calls “the deniable date”:

 

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A post shared by Musa Okwonga (@okwonga)

Okwonga’s book was published on January 26. Order it here or from your favorite local bookshop!