About book

Warri, October 1992: Seething with idleness and nonchalance, sick of watching his parents fight, 16-year-old Ewaen is waiting for university to begin, waiting for something to happen. Months later, Ewaen and friends are finally enrolled as freshmen at the University of Benin. Their routine now consists of hanging out in a parking lot trading jibes, chasing girls and sex, and learning to manage the staff strikes and crumbling infrastructure. But Nigerian campuses in the 1990s can be dangerous places, too. Violent confraternities stake territories and stalk for new recruits. An incident of petty crime snowballs into tragedy... Fine Boys is Eghosa Imasuen’s second novel. In the witty, colloquial style fast becoming his trademark, Imasuen presents everyday Nigerian life against the backdrop of the pro-democracy riots of the 1980s and ‘90s, the lost hopes of June 12th, and the terror of the Abacha years. Indeed Fine Boys is a chronicle of not just a time in Nigeria, but its post-Biafran generation. ---- "With Fine Boys, Eghosa Imasuen proves himself to be a keen observer of Nigerian urban life. He has written an unflinching and witty book, difficult to resist, impossible to ignore. He imbues his energetic prose and compelling characters with candour, grace, and pidgin inventiveness. A writer to watch." —A. Igoni Barrett, author of From Caves of Rotten Teeth “In a society where memory is often repressed, Fine Boys is a robust reminder of a defining moment in our country’s life; with an unhurried yet teasing pace, Eghosa takes us back to a time of innocence and experience, fraternity and fragility and fickleness, of craziness; indeed, an authentic narrative of teenage high jinks and loss; serious and funny in turns, yet heartfelt on the whole.” — Uche Peter Umez, author of The Runaway Hero "In Fine Boys, Imasuen writes fearlessly and beautifully of friendship, love, loss, and betrayal. It is thought-provoking, perfectly paced, uniformly delightful, compassionate, full of humour but also heart-breaking. Eghosa Imasuen has remarkable gifts." --Chika Unigwe, author of The Phoenix "Fine Boys is the first African novel I know that takes us deep into the world of the children of IMF: those post-Berlin wall Africans, like myself, who came of age in the days of The Conditionalities, those imposed tools and policies that made our countries feral; the days that turned good people into beasts, the days that witnessed the great implosion and scattering of the middle classes of a whole continent. Fine Boys takes us deep into the lives of the notorious gangs that took over universities all over Nigeria in the 1990s and early this century. We saw our universities collapse, and we struggled to educate ourselves through very harsh times. It is a beautifully written novel, heartfelt, deeply knowledgeable, funny, a love story, a tragedy; an important book, a book of our times; a book for all Africans everywhere." --Binyavanga Wainaina, author of One Day I Will Write about This Place