Like fine wine, Nduka Otiono’s award winning debut collection of short stories, The Night Hides with a Knife has aged beautifully.
Re-issued April 2021, 25 years after it was first published the book shot to the top of Amazon’s Hot New Releases in African Literature on April 8, 2021 which incidentally was Otiono’s birthday.
The book of 10 stories and which won the Association of Nigerian Author’s (ANA) fiction prize in 1996 was described by the Jury as “a respectable collection of short stories written in elegant and piquant style and demonstrates profound insight into human psychology.”
Professor Harry Garuba had high praise for the collection: “With this first collection of short stories, Nduka Otiono takes us on an impressive, multi-textual journey of resourcefulness and creativity that combines the best of the oral and scribal in Nigeria literary culture: traditional storytelling strategies and conventional narrative forms are overlaced with a fragmentary, postmodern reflexivity; the voice propels the pen, only to get trapped in the tape recorder.”
The Night Hides with a Knife is available on Amazon.
