RAGE OF THE SEA LION

Akum is a young man well-groomed in the art of surviving precariously. His will to tackle every odd pitted against him is manifested very early in life when he assumes the role of the breadwinner in his family just after his father’s death. To survive in Marine Lane, a marginalized part of the town, he needed more than wit and his mother’s religion and that included achieving success by hook or by crook. A chance meeting with the notorious Akwuba while in detention is all he needed to catapult his career into the limelight. He quickly showed his astuteness and dynamism by dishing rapidly the tag “common criminal” and breaking into the ranks of the rich, the powerful, and the law enforcement agents amongst whom he easily flourished But his loyalty to a friend, Prince Iweka, and the betrayal he felt at the hands of his police friends irrevocably become his undoing, as the revenge hunt he started begins to hunt him. “Reading Rage of the Sea Lion is like watching a crime commentary live on the screen. It’s vivid, it’s livid, it makes you breathless as it is seen purely from the protagonist’s point of view. But traversing crime fiction, it reawakes existential questions on criminals, accomplices, and law enforcement agents.” — Mora Vallejo Luciano, Manchester Literary Supplement “The ability of Obi’s stories to thrill, grasp, and flow is so compelling that even when he manages to swiftly take us through the violent 80″s by means of a criminal mind, through his criminal environment and unholy alliances we are left gasping for breath when he finally leaves us with the existential question of the right to crime and existence. This must be the first serious existentialist novel to come out of Africa. Although Akum, the protagonist, is in many ways different to Richard Wright’s Bigger in Black Boy, here, same primordial issue of existence preceding essence has had a vigorous portrayal.” — Pilar Albariño, Karibu, Madrid