04/29/2019
The plight of contemporary African refugees is the dramatic core of this moving tale. The nameless narrator of the book’s opening (the novel is divided into six sections with different characters, but the narrator connects all of them) is a native Nigerian finishing work on his dissertation, who accompanies his American wife on her art fellowship to Berlin. While she paints, he falls in with a community of students who hail from Malawi, Senegal, and other African nations. Through the characters’ friendships and associations, Habila (The Chibok Girls ) relates the stories of a number of asylum seekers who fled wretched circumstances and now face uncertain prospects (among them a former doctor working in Berlin as a nightclub bouncer and a man who escaped with his family from an armed Somalian rebel who was determined to marry the man’s 10-year-old daughter). The narrator comes to know the depths of their desperation himself when, returning from Switzerland, he loses his papers and is deported to a refugee camp in Italy. “Where am I? Who am I? How did I get here?” cries one refugee, summing up the sense of dislocation and loss of identity they all feel, yet Habila never presents them as objects of pity, but rather as exemplars of human resilience. Readers will find this novel a potent tale for these times. (June)
"A moving and eye-opening novel that captures our global political moment and plumbs the many layers of life in exile, of people who are forever bereft in their 'traveling'. Helon Habila writes with the eye of a journalist, the tools of an artist, and the heart of a sober and compassionate witness."
"Unforgettable. Helon Habila writes of individual lives—pulled apart by our wars, our failed states and our deepest fears—with insight and searing compassion."
"Urgent, deeply empathetic, and resisting easy answers, Travelers follows the interconnected lives of African immigrants and refugees in Europe and examines the meanings of freedom, diaspora and home. Habila is a masterful storyteller, and this novel a riveting testament to the power of fiction."
"At once intimate and expansive, Travelers captivated me from the very first pages."
"Once I started reading Travelers , I couldn’t stop. It’s an unsettling book that faces the urgent questions of our times and doesn’t settle for easy answers. Yet the resilience of the characters, the mature decision to avoid melodrama, gives us a novel full of hope and wonder, tied to fully realized characters that as readers, we come to care about. I loved this book. It is indeed Habila at his best."
"I enjoyed Travelers immensely. Habila has written a pressure cooker of a story, an urgent novel that contends with the rootlessness of our world."
★ 06/01/2019
In this timely and ultimately optimistic work, Habila (Oil on Water ) examines the state of the African diaspora in Europe. An unnamed narrator, a Nigerian living in Virginia, accompanies his wife, Gina, to Berlin. There, she will work on an art installation, and he is expected to reignite his passion for a stalled doctoral thesis on the 1884 Berlin Conference at which Western countries plotted to despoil the African continent. Gina's subjects are political exiles and refugees, and as she paints, her husband becomes immersed in their stories. There's cinema student Mark, whose transgender status renders him an outcast in Malawi, and Libyan physician Manu, working as a nightclub bouncer while searching daily for his wife and son, lost during the Mediterranean crossing. When the narrator encounters Karim, a Somali shopkeeper who tells of traveling in exile through Yemen, Syria, and Turkey, a mix-up on the train lands him in a Sicilian deportation camp, where he internalizes the awful nature of statelessness. VERDICT Through six interconnected sections, Caine Prize winner and Chinua Achebe Fellow Habila evokes the visceral, heartbreaking anguish of the outsider's dilemma: to assimilate or return to the land one calls home. Guaranteed to promote empathy and understanding for refugees worldwide. [See Prepub Alert, 12/6/18.]—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
2019-04-28
The narrator is a Nigerian expatriate living in the United States with his American wife, Gina, a portrait artist. Their marriage is strained, but when Gina wins a fellowship in Berlin, the narrator joins her in a last-ditch effort to save the marriage. He soon feels himself a stranger amid Europeans, and his damaged marriage is little comfort: While Gina—whose race is never made explicit—had once been sensitive to the narrator's experiences as a black African immigrant, she is now "more oblivious of what was happening around her, her gaze focused only on her painting." Lonely in Europe, the narrator befriends Mark, a transgender Malawian film student who has escaped to Berlin to pursue his art. Mark favors impassioned proclamations about art and life—"What is the point of art if it is not to resist?" he asks naively—but his reverie is disrupted when he's detained for being in the country on an expired visa. Rattled by this exposure to the ugly side of migration, the narrator leaves Gina so he can travel around Europe, bringing him into contact with other African migrants. In one chapter, we're introduced to Manu, a Libyan of Nigerian extraction who flees his nation for Berlin, where he and his daughter await his wife's arrival. We also encounter Portia, the daughter of a Zambian writer, who's chasing the ghosts of her father and brother in Switzerland and England. Habila (The Chibok Girls , 2017, etc.) weaves the narrator's story through these others, providing readers a guide to the African diaspora. Even among all this movement, the book often feels static, a result of flat characters who, despite their harrowing stories, often seem more like types than people. Habila's prose is beautifully restrained but occasionally so mannered that it feels inert. When the narrator's marriage ends, it simply slides into a silence "occasionally [broken] by birdcalls." The prose undermines a story that should feel more urgent than it does.
A powerful novel about African migrants that suffers from flat characters and prose.
"The novel’s unassuming title is suggestive of [Helon] Habila’s cool, open-minded approach to a hot-button subject. While he leaves us in little doubt of the horrors his characters have escaped, he seldom invites us to gawp. Adroitly teasing out the rich quiddity of his characters’ diverse journeys, he instead makes the simple yet valuable point that refugees’ lives are as irreducibly complex as anyone else’s."
Guardian - Anthony Cummins
"Travellers is a rich mosaic of African migrant experiences."
"The book’s elaborate depiction of a range of personal sacrifices brings into focus the human tragedies obscured by statistics and discussions of public policy."
"Habila has outdone himself, giving his characters the dignity which the media often fails to."
African Arguments - Samira Sawlani
"Habila’s latest is a resonant, relevant novel."
