Travelers: A Novel

by Helon Habila

Overview

A Boston Globe Best Book of 2019

“This is the answer to the question of what contemporary fiction can do.” —Edward Docx, Guardian

Accompanying his wife on a prestigious arts fellowship in Berlin, a Nigerian scholar finds there are no walls between his privileged, secure existence and the stories of others in the African diaspora, including a transgender film student seeking the freedom to live an authentic life, a Libyan doctor who lost his wife and son in the waters of the Mediterranean, and a Somalian shopkeeper who tried to save his young daughter from a marriage forced upon her by a militant commander. Both unsettling and luminous, Travelers is a lean, heartrending exploration of loss and connection. Award-winning author Helon Habila inscribes unforgettable signposts that mark the universal journey in pursuit of love and home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393355710
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/18/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	983,888
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Helon Habila is the author of Oil on Water, Measuring Time, Waiting for an Angel, and The Chibok Girls. He is associate professor of creative writing at George Mason University and lives in Virginia with his wife and three children.

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/01/2019

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

Library Journal

"The novel’s unassuming title is suggestive of [Helon] Habila’s cool, open-minded approach to a hot-button subject. While he leaves us in little doubt of the horrors his characters have escaped, he seldom invites us to gawp. Adroitly teasing out the rich quiddity of his characters’ diverse journeys, he instead makes the simple yet valuable point that refugees’ lives are as irreducibly complex as anyone else’s."

Guardian - Anthony Cummins

"Travellers is a rich mosaic of African migrant experiences."

EastAfrican

"A moving and eye-opening novel that captures our global political moment and plumbs the many layers of life in exile, of people who are forever bereft in their 'traveling'. Helon Habila writes with the eye of a journalist, the tools of an artist, and the heart of a sober and compassionate witness."

Vu Tran

"The book’s elaborate depiction of a range of personal sacrifices brings into focus the human tragedies obscured by statistics and discussions of public policy."

The New Yorker

"Habila has outdone himself, giving his characters the dignity which the media often fails to."

African Arguments - Samira Sawlani

"Unforgettable. Helon Habila writes of individual lives—pulled apart by our wars, our failed states and our deepest fears—with insight and searing compassion."

Madeleine Thien

"I enjoyed Travelers immensely. Habila has written a pressure cooker of a story, an urgent novel that contends with the rootlessness of our world."

Elliot Ackerman

"Habila’s latest is a resonant, relevant novel."

BBC - Jane Ciabattari

"Urgent, deeply empathetic, and resisting easy answers, Travelers follows the interconnected lives of African immigrants and refugees in Europe and examines the meanings of freedom, diaspora and home. Habila is a masterful storyteller, and this novel a riveting testament to the power of fiction."

Lisa Ko

"At once intimate and expansive, Travelers captivated me from the very first pages."

Aminatta Forna

"This novel has all the weight of art with the sting of breaking news.… I loved this book. It is indeed [Helon] Habila at his best."

Leila Aboulela