About this item
From a disciple of the late Chinua Achebe comes a masterful and universally acclaimed novel that is at once a taut, literary thriller and an indictment of greed’s power to subsume all things, including the sacred.Foreign Gods, Inc., tells the story of Ike, a New York-based Nigerian cab driver who sets out to steal the statue of an ancient war deity from his home village and sell it to a New York gallery. Ike's plan is fueled by desperation. Despite a degree in economics from a major American college, his strong accent has barred him from the corporate world. Forced to eke out a living as a cab driver, he is unable to manage the emotional and material needs of a temperamental African American bride and a widowed mother demanding financial support.
About the Author
Okey Ndibe (first name is produced as "Okay") is the author of two novels, "Foreign Gods, Inc." (named one of the best books of 2014 by, among others, Janet Maslin of the New York Times, National Public Radio, Philadelphia Inquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Mosaic magazine) , and "Arrows of Rain" as well as the memoir, "Never Look an American in the Eye: Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts and the Making of a Nigerian American" (winner of the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for non-fiction) . He is also a co-editor (with Zimbabwean writer, Chenjerai Hove) of "Writers Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa." His career as an author began after he responded in the affirmative when African American writer John Edgar Wideman asked, "You're working on a novel, right? " Ndibe was a 2015-2016 Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He earned MFA and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and has taught at St. Lawrence University, Brown University, Trinity College, Simon's Rock College, Connecticut College, and the University of Lagos (as a Fulbright scholar) . He served as the founding editor of African Commentary, a US-based international magazine published by the late novelist, Chinua Achebe. He was a member of the editorial board of Hartford Courant, the oldest continuously published newspaper in the US, where his journalism won national and state awards. Ndibe's essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, BBC online, Financial Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera online, The Mail & Guardian (South Africa) , Fabian Society Journal, www.saharareporters.com, and www.thisisafrica.me. For more than fifteen years he wrote a widely syndicated weekly column on Nigerian politics and culture. He is currently working on a novel titled "Native Tongues".
