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Musungu Jim
'Musungu Jim And The Great Chief Tuloko' was published by Penguin in March 2000. It got some really good reviews. Some of them are below but I can't seem to find the rest. Or maybe I dreamed them all up anyway. It also won a Betty Trask Award and was nominated for three or four other prizes. But it didn't win any of them so I seem to have forgotten what they're called. You can now buy a signed copy of the new edition at the bottom of this page.
What the blurb says:
When student teacher Jim Tulloh arrives in Zambawi, he doesn't realise he's about to be sucked into the rebirth of a nation ...
Zambawi, a banana republic in sub-Saharan Africa, is on the verge of a revolution. President Adini, dictator and eunuch, desperately clings to power and his prosthetic testicles. But his right-hand man is only interested in poetry and the past, his son is obsessed with girls not guerrillas, and the state army switch sides so often they don't know which uniform to wear.
Meanwhile, the mellow pattern of Jim's days - smoking flatulent weed with Musa, a Rastafarian witchdoctor, and PK the headmaster - is disturbed when Jim is kidnapped from his bush school by the rebel Black Boot Gang. And when the Gangers invoke the spirit of Zambawi's Great Chief Tuloko, Jim's fate takes an unexpected twist in an awe-inspiring collision of myth and the moment.
Patrick Neate's first novel is an idiosyncratic tale of coups, colonialism and coming of age. And rubber balls. And gulu gulu. And magic ...
What the critics say:
'Musungu Jim is a great romp, written with all the sharp flippancy of Louis de Bernières early novels.' The Times
'An unusually engaging first novel bursting with promise.' Metro
'An assured debut novel ... combines satire with a humane sensibility and a pacy narrative.' Marie Claire
Buy it online:
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Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuluoko
