Helon Habila is the author of the novels, Waiting for an Angel, Measuring Time, Oil on Water, and a nonfiction book, The Chibok Girls. His writing has won numerous awards including the Caine Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Windham-Campbell Prize. He is professor of creative writing at George Mason University. Travelers (W. W. Norton & Company) is his most recent novel. A Nigerian graduate student who has made his home in America knows what it means to strike out for new shores. When his wife proposes that he accompany her to Berlin, where she has been awarded a prestigious arts fellowship, he has his reservations. In Berlin, Habila’s central character finds himself thrown into contact with a community of African immigrants and refugees whose lives previously seemed distant from his own, but to which he is increasingly drawn. The walls between his privileged, secure existence and the stories of these other Africans on the move soon crumble, and his sense of identity begins to dissolve as he finds that he can no longer separate himself from others’ horrors, or from Africa. A lean, expansive, heart-rending exploration of loss and of connection, Travelers inscribes unforgettable signposts―both unsettling and luminous―marking the universal journey in pursuit of love and home.
