Every Day Is for the Thief - 9780812995787

For readers of J. M. Coetzee and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Every Day Is for the Thief is Teju Cole’s second novel, following his critically acclaimed debut, Open City—winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and named one of the best books of the year by more than twenty publications.

Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud.

A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the “yahoo yahoo” diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet café, longs after a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused of stealing at a local market.

Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—and slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself.

In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven with original photos by the author, Every Day Is for the Thief is a wholly original amalgamation of fiction, memory, art, and travel writing. Originally published in Nigeria in 2007, this revised and updated edition is the first time this unique book has been available outside Africa. You’ve never read a book like Every Day Is for the Thief because no one writes like Teju Cole.

Advance praise for Every Day Is for the Thief

“Every Day is for the Thief is an amazing hybrid of a book. Imaginative, original, experimental, and sensual, this book revisits the way narrative is constructed with tenderness and style.”—Chris Abani, author of Graceland

Praise for Open City

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award
Finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award

“An indelible debut . . . a compassionate and masterly work.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Beautiful, subtle, [and] original.”—The New Yorker

“A psychological hand grenade.”—The Atlantic

“Magnificent . . . a remarkably resonant feat of prose.”—The Seattle Times