Search Sweet Country

A startling, densely poetic portrait of 1970s Ghana as it emerges from colonial rule Winner of the Valco Fund Literary Award for Fiction and the Ghana Book Award Search Sweet Country follows the lives of an eclectic, interconnected group of Ghanaians living in and around the sprawling, chaotic city of Accra in the mid-1970s. Bringing the city to life in dizzying, lyrical prose, Laing weaves a story filled with bizarre and often melancholy characters- an idealistic professor, a lovely young witch, a wide-eyed student, a corrupt politician and his hack sidekick, a business-savvy young woman, a healer, a bishop and a crazy man intent on founding his own village. Their collective narratives create a portrait of a country where colonialism is dying, but democracy remains elusive. Search Sweet Country is a timeless, near-forgotten gem by a virtuosic writer, as necessary now as when the book was first published. Like Joyce's Dublin and Dickens's London, Laing's Accra brims with both lush specificity and universal relevance.

Kojo Laing was born on the Gold Coast, Ghana, in 1946, studied in Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1960s, before returning to Accra, where he would spend the rest of his life as a novelist, poet and educator. A writer of soaring originality and pioneer of Afrofuturism, his Search Sweet Country (1986) won numerous awards, vast critical acclaim, and has been praised as 'the finest novel written in English ever to come out of the African continent' (Binyavanga Wainaina).