ISBN 978-1-946395-10-8 | trade paper | $15 | publication date Feb 2019
Abandoned by his birth mother, losing his adoptive mother to cancer, and failing to connect with his distant adoptive father, Leke—a troubled young man living in Cape Town—has developed some odd and possibly destructive habits: he stalks strangers, steals small objects, and visits doctors and healers in search of friendship. Through a series of letters written to him from prison by his Nigerian father, a man he has never met, Leke learns about the family curse—a curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. Leke’s search to break the curse leads him to strange places.
reviews
“Bom Boy is an intricately structured literary novel that powerfully evokes family as a source of loss and struggle, but also of hope.” —Foreword Reviews
“Through three decades, two countries and multiple points of view, a complete picture of Leke’s life in the present slowly surfaces in Yewande Omotoso’s debut novel. […] Despite his quirks, Leke’s plight is curiously engaging as it speaks to the universal yearning to belong somewhere with someone.” —Shelf Awareness
“Omotoso’s concise prose captures the racial complexities of the book’s backdrop while enabling her protagonist to find his own way with her evocative plotting.” —World Literature Today
“[A] story about grief, loneliness, and a hunger for belonging. […] A short and refreshing novel that I very much recommend” —Shelf Unbound
“In this intricate and evocative novel about loss and separation, every character, exchange, sentiment and locale is rendered with due precision. Yewande Omotoso is a remarkably perceptive writer.” —Sefi Atta, author of Everything Good Will Come.
“How did Yewande Omotoso pack so much in such a slender book? Bom Boy is a remarkable exploration of history and identity, love and loss. Omotoso’s writing is honest, passionate and compelling.” —Chika Ungiwe, author On Black Sisters Street and The Black Messiah
The Author
Yewande Omotoso is an architect, with a masters in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel Bomboy (2011 Modjaji Books), won the South African Literary Award First Time Author Prize and was shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature. She was a 2015 Miles Morland Scholar. Yewande’s second novel The Woman Next Door (Chatto and Windus) was published in May 2016. It was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Aidoo-Snyder Prize, the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, and the UJ Literary Prize. It was also longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Literature Prize. The Woman Next Door was also nominated for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the fiction category.