Every Day Is for the Thief

by Teju Cole

Overview

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY DWIGHT GARNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle | NPR | The Root | The Telegraph | The Globe and Mail

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • FINALIST, PHILLIS WHEATLEY BOOK AWARD • TEJU COLE WAS NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL AFRICANS OF THE YEAR BY NEW AFRICAN MAGAZINE

For readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Michael Ondaatje, Every Day Is for the Thief is a wholly original work of fiction by Teju Cole, whose critically acclaimed debut, Open City, was the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was 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—originally published in Nigeria in 2007—is a wholly original work of fiction. This revised and updated edition is the first version of this unique book to be made available outside Africa. You’ve never read a book like Every Day Is for the Thief because no one writes like Teju Cole.

Praise for Every Day Is for the Thief

“A luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and return . . . extraordinary.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Cole is following in a long tradition of writerly walkers who, in the tradition of Baudelaire, make their way through urban spaces on foot and take their time doing so. Like Alfred Kazin, Joseph Mitchell, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (with whom he is often compared), Cole adds to the literature in his own zeitgeisty fashion.”—The Boston Globe

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812985856
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/03/2015
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	370,935
Product dimensions:	5.19(w) x 7.87(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 and raised in Nigeria. He is the author of Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York City Book Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His photography has been exhibited in India and the United States. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

Read an Excerpt

One
(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Every Day Is for the Thief"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Teju Cole.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Editorial Reviews

A luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and return . . . extraordinary.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“[Teju] Cole is following in a long tradition of writerly walkers who, in the tradition of Baudelaire, make their way through urban spaces on foot and take their time doing so. Like Alfred Kazin, Joseph Mitchell, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (with whom he is often compared), Cole adds to the literature in his own zeitgeisty fashion.”—The Boston Globe

“Crisp, affecting . . . Cole constructs a narrative of fragments, a series of episodes that he allows to resonate.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Hugely rewarding . . . [Every Day Is for the Thief] is both a celebration of one of the world’s most vibrant cities and a lament over what can be one of the most frustrating and difficult places to live. It is also a story of family breakup and an uneasy homecoming—the narrator has been away for fifteen years and must relearn how to navigate a place that was once home.”—NPR

“[Every Day Is for the Thief has] a restraint that allows [Teju Cole] to slip in these exquisitely rendered observations on life, love, art that leave you feeling richer and more attuned to your own reality once you’ve finished reading.”—Dinaw Mengestu, The Atlantic

“Shimmering . . . transcendent.”—The Seattle Times

“Wonderful . . . a book that never fails to find a thoughtful and essential thing to say.”—Los Angeles Times

“Fearless, nimble, and surprising.”—The Daily Beast

“To read Cole is to be swept away by the language of a master wordsmith. In Every Day Is for the Thief, the PEN/Hemingway Award winner turns his considerable talents to the character of the expatriate, a young Nigerian medical student living in New York City who returns home to Lagos for a short visit. In his adventures wandering the town, reflections on the Nigerian homeland and the self-as-outsider arise. This work was originally published in Nigeria in 2007, four years before the release of Cole’s novel Open City, but was not available in the U.S. until now. We are thankful that non-Nigerian readers can now enjoy Cole’s first novel.”—The Root

“A Teju Cole novel is a reading experience matched by few contemporary writers.”—Flavorwire

“Every Day Is for the Thief, by turns funny, mournful, and acerbic, offers a portrait of Nigeria in which anger, perhaps the most natural response to the often lamentable state of affairs there, is somehow muted and deflected by the author’s deep engagement with the country: a profoundly disenchanted love. Teju Cole is among the most gifted writers of his generation.”—Salman Rushdie

“[A] tightly focused but still marvelously capacious little novel . . . built with cool originality . . . The house of literature [Cole] is busy creating is an in-between space with fluid dimensions, resisting entrenchment.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“Every Day Is for the Thief holds something for people with all levels of familiarity with Nigeria. It is an introduction and a provocation, a beautifully simple portrait and a nuanced examination. It invites you to steal a glimpse of Lagos.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

From the Publisher

Taking his cues from W. G. Sebald, John Berger and Bruce Chatwin, Cole constructs a narrative of fragments, a series of episodes that he allows to resonate, interspersing them with photographs. A less stylish writer would have become bogged down by the demands of narrative, spelling out the narrator's relationships with his family and friends in a way that Every Day Is for the Thief deftly avoids. Cole places his narrator in fleeting situations where the fault lines in his identity are most likely to crack open.

The New York Times Book Review - Hari Kunzru

…a book of taut peregrinations…Mr. Cole's novels assume the shape of travel writing, and they are sly commentaries on the genre. They are also dense with travel writing's pleasures, with sharp, sudden observation…his novels are lean, expertly sustained performances. The places he can go, you feel, are just about limitless. The story [Cole] tells here is just about the most primal one, "an inquiry into what it was I longed for all those times I longed for home."

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

04/14/2014
Novelist Cole's Open City brought him international attention, but this novel, first published in Nigeria and now currently being republished in the U.S. and the U.K., was actually his first. Set in contemporary Lagos, Nigeria, the novel follows a nameless narrator's visit to his homeland after a lengthy stay in the United States. Estranged from his mother and unemotional about his father's death, the protagonist seeks his humanity and redemption in art. Cole's crisp language captures how Lagos—the home of numerous Internet scams and frequent power cuts—possesses a violence that both disgusts his protagonist and fascinates him. With journalism-like objectivity, Cole by way of his narrator details a Nigeria that is violent and corrupt, but also multi-cultural and alive. This pared-down writing style comes at the cost of character development. (For example, the narrator's training as a psychiatrist is never really explored.) As a result, the novel reads more like a beautiful work of creative nonfiction. The structure is loose, a collection of observances of daily life in Lagos in which Cole presents the complexities of culture and poverty. In addition, Cole sprinkles dramatic black-and-white photos throughout the book, but it's his willingness to explore so many uncomfortable paradoxes that sears this narrative into our brains. Agent: Andrew Wylie, The Wylie Agency. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Mr. Cole’s novels assume the shape of travel writing, and they are sly commentaries on the genre. They are also dense with travel writing’s pleasures, with sharp, sudden observation…Yet his novels are lean, expertly sustained performances. The places he can go, you feel, are just about limitless. The story he tells here is just about the most primal one, ‘an inquiry into what it was I longed for all those times I longed for home.’”

New York Times

It’s a novella, it’s a travel journal, it’s a laundry list of methods of thievery, it’s an examination of Nigerian societal norms, it’s the lamentations of an outsider, it’s a photo album. That Cole pulls this off at all is commendable. That it was his first book is a marvel.”

The Onion / A.V. Club

Bracingly cool and introspective — and gorgeously written…Cole has a way of superimposing emotional landscapes over his portraits of physical places that is transcendent. EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF is as much as an epic journey into the heart of the traveler as the place traveled.”

Seattle Times

Remarkable…A luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and return…this is an extraordinary novel, a radiant meditation on the nature of happiness and faith, corruption, misfortune and belonging.”

San Francisco Chronicle

EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF is a wonderful meditation on modern African life that will help cement Cole’s reputation as a prose stylist. More than that, it is a book that never fails to find a thoughtful and essential thing to say, with each of its finely crafted sentences and paragraphs offering a vision of justice and order to a people beset by so many woes.”

Los Angeles Times

Crisp, affecting…Taking his cues from W.G. Sebald, John Berger, and Bruce Chatwin, Cole constructs a narrative of fragments, a series of episodes that he allows to resonate.

New York Times Book Review

EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF is a testament to [Nigeria’s] power to inspire.”

Vanity Fair

Cole’s photography punctuates each scene of the book, and his visual art complements the structure of the story well…excellently crafted.”

Huffington Post

EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF is unapologetically a novel of ideas: a diagnosis of the systemic corruption in Cole’s native Lagos and of corruption’s psychological effects. But, remarkably, the book avoids any the chunkiness that usually accompanies such work. Emotional and intellectual life are woven too tightly together. The ideas make the character and vice versa.”

The New Republic

A vivid, lyrical and critical novel in which a man returns to his native Nigeria after years away and learns new truths about himself…Cole’s prose is as intoxicating as before, his narrator’s curiosity infectious and his depiction of Lagos, a city where “life hangs out,” stunning.”

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Everything he does is worth reading, but a Teju Cole novel is a reading experience matched by few contemporary writers…Cole skillfully picks up on the smallest of moments that we couldn’t be bothered to stop and observe…There are also vibrant moments of beauty and power that few writers can pull off… [EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF] is balanced from start to finish. It’s Teju Cole proving, yet again that he is doing something different, working outside the boundaries of the conversations the literary community keeps having with itself, and it works out right every time.”

Flavorwire

10/01/2013
In Cole's masterly 2011 debut, Open City, a PEN/Hemingway Prize winner and National Book Critics Circle finalist that received best book recognition from nearly two dozen publications, a Nigerian immigrant ambles reflectively through the streets of Manhattan. In this new work, an unnamed Nigerian writer who has returned home ambles reflectively through the streets of Lagos and discovers a grand, passionate city. As John Coltrane's music blends with the muezzin's call to prayer, the narrator sees a woman reading Michael Ondaatje and teenagers behaving illegally on the Internet, even as he talks to old friends and relatives as he tries to find his way. Open City was a distinctive and mesmerizing work, troublesome for some readers but a decided and exciting step ahead in the use of narrative, and readers will be anticipating. With a five-city tour.

Library Journal

2014-03-04
A Nigerian living in the U.S. finds corruption, delight and ghosts on a return visit to Lagos in this rich, rougher-edged predecessor to Cole's celebrated debut novel (Open City, 2011). First published in Nigeria in 2007, this novella records the unnamed narrator's impressions of the city he left 13 years earlier. His observations range from comic to bitterly critical, playing off memories of growing up in Lagos and his life abroad. Cole paints brisk scenes that convey the dangers and allure of the "gigantic metropolis" in prose that varies from plain to almost poetic to overwrought. The narrator says a woman holding a book by Michael Ondaatje "makes my heart leap up into my mouth and thrash about like a catfish in a bucket." Bribe-hungry police, a vibrant street market, perilous bus rides, brazen home invaders: From the locally commonplace emerge sharp contrasts with the West. Coming to the market, for instance, he recalls an 11-year-old boy burned alive for petty theft. In the city's many new Internet cafes, a "sign of the newly vital Nigerian economy," teens write emails to perpetrate the "advance fee fraud" for which the country has become infamous. The returnee laments the dilapidation and skewed historical record of the National Museum before admiring the world-class facilities of the Musical Society of Nigeria Centre. It's a graphic contrast that billboards questions bedeviling the narrator: Why did I leave? Should I return for good? What have I gained? Or lost? Such an exile's catechism could serve with slight variations the many displaced people Cole writes of in the "open city" of New York. And as with the novel, the influence of W.G. Sebald arises again here, not least in Cole's addition of photographs that are much like the novella's prose: uneven yet often evocative.

Kirkus Reviews