The second of the Nobel Prize-winner's classic works of autobiographyIn 1984, two years after writing his classic childhood autobiography Aké: The Years of Childhood, Wole Soyinka opened a tin box that had belonged to his father, a schoolteacher during Nigeria's Colonial period. The simple contents of this box - 'a handful of letters, old journals with marked pages and annotations, notebook jottings, tax and other levy receipts, minutes of meetings and school reports, programme notes of special events' - provide the fuel for this second instalment of Soyinka's memoirs: a son's fictionalised 'voyage' into the life and times of his father.
'The book yields the bounties of a superbly orchestrated narrative. The gentle laughter of hard-won wisdom pervades its pages. It grows on you later with the loveliness of a life well lived, with a hint that fulfilment is in contentment and that life's pleasures are won slowly ... Excellent' Ben Okri, Daily Telegraph