THE FIVE SORROWFUL MYSTERIES OF ANDY AFRICA

A Black Nigerian teen has high hopes for a romance with a visiting White girl.

Andrew “Andy” Aziza, the narrator of Buoro’s rich debut novel, is infuriated at nearly everything in his life. His hometown, Kontagora, is prone to violent clashes between its Muslim and Catholic communities. African culture, he thinks, can’t measure up to the sophistication and cool of England and the United States. (Indeed, he detests all of “this crappy continent.”) He’s bereft of a father and carries on conversations in his head with his stillborn brother, whom he calls Ydna. He takes some comfort in his friends and his mother, a local photographer. But in his eyes, salvation (and the religious rhetoric here runs deep, from the title on down) can only truly arrive in the form of Eileen, a niece of the local priest visiting from the U.K. It’s not hard to see that disappointment is coming—and Buoro overextends the path getting there. But he doesn’t lapse into easy clichés about loving what you have. It also helps that Andy is a winning narrator, by turns self-deprecating and sardonic (“I haven’t seen a blonde before. Because this is Africa. And there are -0.001 blondes here”) and lyrical as well, thanks to Andy’s poetry, interspersed throughout. Since Andy and Eileen’s trajectory is fairly predictable, its most engaging elements involve the B-plots: the religious attacks, the difficulty of escaping the country, the surprising ways literature can spark a connection. (Eileen and Andy bond over Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which is doing a lot of symbolic work.) The title’s crucifixion reference frames Andy as both a Christ figure and a comically self-martyring figure, and Buoro has an assured grasp of religious and coming-of-age themes.

A promising debut that upends the typical bildungsroman.