A Season of Light

For fans of Behold the Dreamers, comes a compelling novel about a tightly bound Nigerian family living in Florida and the wounds that get passed down from generation to generation, from the author of the acclaimed Mr. and Mrs. Doctor.

When 276 schoolgirls are abducted from their school in Nigeria, Fidelis Ewerike, a Florida-based barrister, poet, and former POW of the Nigerian Civil War, begins to go mad, consumed by memories of his younger sister Ugochi, who went missing during that conflict. Consumed by survivor’s guilt and fearful that the same fate awaits Amara, his sixteen-year-old daughter who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ugochi, Fidelis locks her in her bedroom, offering no words of explanation, only lovingly—if poorly—made meals and sweets.

Amid that singular action, the Ewerike family spirals into chaos: After unsuccessful attempts to free her daughter from her room, his wife Adaobi seeks the counsel of a preacher, praying for spiritual liberation from the curse she is certain has plagued her family since leaving Nigeria. Fourteen-year-old Chuk, beset by his own war with the neighborhood boys, receives a painful education on force, masculinity, and his tenuous position within his family. And rebellious, resentful Amara is hungry for her life to be hers, so the moment she is able to escape her imprisonment, she falls in love—not with the Aba-born engineer-in-training her mother envisages, but with Maksym Kostyk, the son of the town drunk. Before long, the two have concocted a plan to run away from the trappings of their familial traumas.

Perfect for readers of Sing, Unburied, Sing, Julie Iromuanya's A Season of Light is an all-consuming masterpiece. To peer into the window of the Ewerike family’s lives is a gift.

Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. She is a 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation fellow, and she was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton. She is an assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago and affiliate faculty of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she is the daughter of Igbo Nigerian immigrants.