The Hangman's Game

by Karen King-Aribisala

When a young Guyanese woman sets out to write a historical novel based on the Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823, she is beset by questions about her own African roots. To free her writer's block, she travels to Nigeria to experience her origins first-hand, and she soon finds herself brutally plunged into a world where the distinctions between her life and her fiction are blurred. Rich in tension, dark humor, and striking characters, this densely layered work offers an unparalleled look into the complex history of past and present Guyana, as well as the nature of postcolonial power in both Africa and the Caribbean.

Genres: Africa

187 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2007

About the author

Karen Ann King-Aribisala (born Guyana) is a Nigerian novelist, and short story writer. Her collection of stories, Our Wife and Other Stories won the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book Africa, and her novel The Hangman's Game won 2008 Best Book Africa.

She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Lagos. She won grants from the Ford Foundation, British Council, Goethe Institute, and the James Michener Foundation.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[armin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first time reading Karen King Aribisala and it did not happen to be an extraordinary one! It’s about a writer who is trying to wrote a novel about the Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 and in order to do that she goes back to Nigeria for a better historical grasp but this, happening right at the beginning, remains an unexplored theme in the story as it winds up into a coup in Nigeria and the two stories somehow start to develop a sort of parallelism that could be much more elaborate than it actually is.