What does it mean for a man to surface 44 years after he’d been pronounced dead by his family and everyone who knew him and bequeath his fortune to his grandson? And then for this grandson to embark on a transcontinental journey to trace the uniquely marvellous story of a grandfather he never knew but whose story begins to read like a legend from outer space? This is the story Maik Nwosu has spun in his uniquely told family saga that reads like a fable.
From the title The Book of Everything (Crossroads, New York, 2025), the reader is invited to inhabit the fantastic world of Ile and his illustrious grandfather Ileka, who refused to inherit the priesthood of the goddess Ani that was due to him. He rebelled and then left to study medicine abroad instead and set up a hospital in his community and became King Lazarus. Ileka would disappear and be deemed dead after seven years of vain search for him.
Ile has just secured a tenured job in a university in the US after his programme when a voicemail unsettled his world as he knew it. A message from South Africa informs him that a lawyer, acting on his recently deceased grandfather, Ileka’s instructions, wants him to get in touch regarding the estate he has been bequeathed. Ile is confused. His grandfather had been dead forty-four years ago when he was barely 11 years old. How could a man who was long dead now bequeath an estate to him in South Africa? The unsettling, bizarre message leaves Ile scrambling to unravel the most improbable story he ever heard. He puts a call to his Uncle Ibe and Aunt Rosette in Nigeria, who though agree that his grandfather had since ‘died’, Ile needed to come to Nigeria, so he could be properly schooled on the family history. This puzzles Ile the more. His own father had died peacefully in his sleep, just as he’d been told his grandfather died many years ago.
Newly married Ile and his wife Ella then set off to Nigeria. After meeting his uncle and aunt, Ile would leave for South Africa to see his late grandfather’s lawyers and learn more about the mystery of one man dying twice 44 years apart. In Nigeria, Ile is led into what amounts to initiation into family tradition, the part his grandfather played in the life of Fegge community that his great grandfather founded alongside other band of adventurers. His grandfather’s refusal to follow the footsteps of his father to be priest of Ani and his foray into medicine and ultimately becoming the man who everyone in Fegge brought their problems and how he attended to them all is the stuff of legend Ile learns in one evening of family narration.
And then suddenly, Ile’s grandfather disappeared after reading in the newspapers that two men had landed on the moon in 1969, and as Uncle Ibe narrated in retrospect, Ile’s grandfather kept repeating to himself: ‘A man walked on the moon. A man walked on the moon. A man walked on the moon.’ This singular and amazing feat would stir Ileka’s wandering spirit that was noticeable in him as a child, as Uncle Ibe recounted earlier: ‘But I think Father was born a wanderer, and the beatings he received from his father could not still his wandering spirit.’
When Ileka disappeared and became dead to his family and community, it took seven years before he could be buried as tradition required. And in those seven years, both the family and community turned the world upside-down to search for him without luck. But 44 years later, he emerges again as having recently died in South Africa. Nwosu’s The Book of Everything is a tour d’force in its narrative flair. Nwosu seizes on this family saga to weave intimate stories into one huge fabric like his grandfather’s intriguing wall in Stellenbosch that provides so much mystery. In The Book of Everything, Nwosu invites us to inhabit Ile’s intimate life with his wife Ella, the quaint manner of their meeting and how it aborted his intention to return home after his studies in America. The novel also becomes the lens through which we are let into the gossips that pepper the lives of Nigerians who live in Houston and parts of America, how much the American bug has bitten the Nigerian men and women, as they struggle to make sense of modern marriages and how some hardly last the first three months. Even Nigeria’s failure as a country does not escape Nwosu’s roving narrative lens.
Nwosu also lets us into the family bond that unites Ile’s Uncle Ibe and Aunt Rosette, and how Uncle Ibe’s luscious narrative of a lifetime he was forced to abandon in the village collides with the modern one he must live. He narrative of his ogba ngbada cult is as romantic as can be had with his love for the village and all the allure there is to savour like fresh palm wine and bush meat. Uncle Ibe is cast as the last of the old order who holds the tenuous link between the glorious past and the ugly present. Also in Aunt Rosette’s posture about her being still firmly rooted in her father’s compound and family is Nwosu’s gender ordering; a woman marrying away does not make her any less a part of the family. Marriage does not cast the girlchild out of her first family. Uncle Ibe is forced to defer to her although Aunt Rosette knows enough when not to push things when men must take precedent.
Ile’s grandfather for whom he’s named is as grand a character as they come. Everyone who met and related with him cast him in legendary status. From his own children, his lawyer Egwuatu, his maid in South Africa, Thelma and to those he worked with in troubled parts of the world that he extended his missionary, priestly work, Ileka was a man who stood apart from the crowd and got his flowers everywhere he went.
Nwosu’s The Book of Everything is a transcontinental narrative that spans America, Nigeria, South Africa and London. In each of these stops, Nwosu takes his readers by hand and leads them through these places like a tour guide. This is one of the best novels I have read in 2025 with its measured pace, wise cracks and great conversation.
