Love is Power or Something Like That

Barrett's artful, unsparing and unsentimental stories confirm the arrival of a major talent.

Teju Cole, author of Open City

It left me in tears. He is the most exciting writer producing right now. He has an incredible range, a unique voice, and has the power to move.

Binyavanga Wainaina

A. Igoni Barrett is a writer who has succeeded in making colloquial literature without seeking spurious attention by vulgar daring. Here is a reader’s entry to hearing on the page how contemporary communication, not only in his Nigeria, can be inventive. Love Is Power, or Something Like That is, to paraphrase its title: something alive, like that

Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Booker and Nobel Prize for Literature

A. Igoni Barrett does for Lagos what Chekhov did for Saint Petersburg and what Joyce did for Dublin, namely, to give a real face to a place that is too often maligned or mythologized

Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Rails Under My Back and Holding Pattern

A bewitching juxtaposition of the grotesque and uplifting, rotten and humane

Michela Wrong, author of It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower

Barrett captures both the quotidian and the elevated with a gaze that is as relentless as it is sympathetic. Here’s a writer to watch

Helon Habila, author of Oil on Water

Brilliant, unforgettable, violent, compassionate

Carolyn Cooke, author of Daughters of the Revolution