Commonwealth and Caine honoree and recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize (big kudos there), Habila here explores the lives of those compelled to leave their home country. A Nigerian scholar, in Berlin with his wife on her arts fellowship, cannot separate himself from the pain of other Africans he meets.

In this timely and ultimately optimistic work, Habila (Oil on Water) examines the state of the African diaspora in Europe. An unnamed narrator, a Nigerian living in Virginia, accompanies his wife, Gina, to Berlin. There, she will work on an art installation, and he is expected to reignite his passion for a stalled doctoral thesis on the 1884 Berlin Conference at which Western countries plotted to despoil the African continent. Gina's subjects are political exiles and refugees, and as she paints, her husband becomes immersed in their stories. There's cinema student Mark, whose transgender status renders him an outcast in Malawi, and Libyan physician Manu, working as a nightclub bouncer while searching daily for his wife and son, lost during the Mediterranean crossing. When the narrator encounters Karim, a Somali shopkeeper who tells of traveling in exile through Yemen, Syria, and Turkey, a mix-up on the train lands him in a Sicilian deportation camp, where he internalizes the awful nature of statelessness. VERDICT Through six interconnected sections, Caine Prize winner and Chinua Achebe Fellow Habila evokes the visceral, heartbreaking anguish of the outsider's dilemma: to assimilate or return to the land one calls home. Guaranteed to promote empathy and understanding for refugees worldwide. [See Prepub Alert, 12/6/18.]—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

The plight of contemporary African refugees is the dramatic core of this moving tale. The nameless narrator of the book's opening (the novel is divided into six sections with different characters, but the narrator connects all of them) is a native Nigerian finishing work on his dissertation, who accompanies his American wife on her art fellowship to Berlin. While she paints, he falls in with a community of students who hail from Malawi, Senegal, and other African nations. Through the characters' friendships and associations, Habila (The Chibok Girls) relates the stories of a number of asylum seekers who fled wretched circumstances and now face uncertain prospects (among them a former doctor working in Berlin as a nightclub bouncer and a man who escaped with his family from an armed Somalian rebel who was determined to marry the man's 10-year-old daughter). The narrator comes to know the depths of their desperation himself when, returning from Switzerland, he loses his papers and is deported to a refugee camp in Italy. "Where am I? Who am I? How did I get here?" cries one refugee, summing up the sense of dislocation and loss of identity they all feel, yet Habila never presents them as objects of pity, but rather as exemplars of human resilience. Readers will find this novel a potent tale for these times. (June)