In Conversation: On New York, My Village: A Novel

Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies: A Novel, Arcadia, and The Monsters of Templeton, and the short story collection Florida, among others. She has won the Story Prize and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. In Matrix: A Novel (Riverhead Books), 17-year-old Marie de France is cast from the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine to be the prioress of an impoverished English abbey where the nuns are on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. Facing the challenges of her new life, Marie steadily supplants her desire for a family, homeland, and the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters and a conviction in her own divine visions. The last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, Marie is determined to chart a boldly different course – for the women she now leads and protects, and for herself. “Groff has outdone herself with an accomplishment as radiant as Marie’s visions,” said Publishers Weekly, praising what is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

Uwem Akpan’s fiction and autobiographical pieces have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Guardian Nigeria, and O, The Oprah Magazine. His New York Times bestseller Say You’re One of Them won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region), the PEN Open Book Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He is from Ikot Akpan Eda in the Niger Delta in Nigeria. In New York, My Village: A Novel (W.W. Norton & Company), Nigerian editor Ekong Udousoro is in New York City with a chance to learn at the center of the publishing industry. He’s met with kindness, but he also soon witnesses the ruthlessness of the business, a shared hostility toward the “other,” a bedrock of white cultural superiority, and racist assumptions about Africa and its people. Ekong’s life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. In overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, bonding with true allies at work, and advocating for healing back home, he finds that there is still hope in sharing our stories – even as tribalism defines our lives, no matter the size of our village. Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot, praised New York, My Village, saying “[Akpan] has transformed the isolating and exhausting intricacies of war trauma into a compulsively readable novel, at once hilarious, utterly harrowing, profoundly optimistic, and horrifically informative. … I adored this book.”