The Fishermen

A striking debut novel about an unforgettable childhood, by a Nigerian writer the New York Times has crowned "the heir to Chinua Achebe." Told by nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, THE FISHERMEN is the Cain and Abel-esque story of a childhood in Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his absence to skip school and go fishing. At the forbidden nearby river, they meet a madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact-both tragic and redemptive-will transcend the lives and imaginations of the book's characters and readers. Dazzling and viscerally powerful, THE FISHERMEN is an essential novel about Africa, seen through the prism of one family's destiny.

WINNER OF THE 2016 NAACP IMAGE AWARDS IN THE OUTSTANDING LITERARY WORK – DEBUT AUTHOR CATEGORY SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 MAN BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD In a small town in western Nigeria, four young brothers – the youngest is nine, the oldest fifteen – use their strict father’s absence from home to go fishing at a forbidden local river. They encounter a dangerous local madman who predicts that the oldest brother will be killed by another. This prophecy breaks their strong bond, and unleashes a tragic chain of events of almost mythic proportions. Passionate and bold, The Fishermen is a breathtakingly beautiful novel, firmly rooted in the best of African storytelling. With this powerful debut, Chigozie Obioma emerges as one of the most original new voices in world literature. PRAISE FOR CHIGOZIE OBOMA ‘It's like being in a Zola or Theodore Dreiser novel … The Fishermen is an elegy to lost promise … and yet it remains hopeful about the redemptive possibilities of a new generation’ The Guardian ‘[S]tructurally complex … a novel of uncommon grace.’ The Saturday Age

‘Illusory, frightening, and deeply moving, The Fisherman is a modern horror epic. And it’s simply a must read’ Paul Tremblay In upstate New York, within the woods, Dutchman’s Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked and fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other’s company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumours of the Creek and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss them. Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It's a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it. ‘An epic, yet intimate, horror novel. Langan channels M. R. James, Robert E. Howard and Norman Maclean. What you get is A River Runs Through It... straight to hell’ Laird Barron More praise for The Fisherman ‘Reading this, your mouth fills with worms. Just let them wriggle and crawl as they will, though—don’t swallow. John Langan is fishing for your sleep, for your soul. I fear he’s already got mine’ Stephen Graham Jones ‘What starts as a slow, melancholy tale gains momentum and drops you head first into a churning nightmare from which you might escape, but you’ll never forget, and the memory of what you saw will change you forever’ Richard Kadrey ‘The Fisherman is a treasure, the kind of book you just want to snuggle up and shiver through. I can’t say enough good things about the confidence, the patience, the satisfying cumulative power of this book. It was a pleasure to read from the first page to the last’ Victor LaValle ‘Stories within stories, folk tales becoming modern legends, all spinning into a fisherman’s tale about the one he wishes had gotten away. Langan’s latest is at turns epic and personal, dense yet compulsively readable, frightening but endearing’ Adam Cesare

Don Morales tells stories. He tells lots of stories. About Chimbote, the Peruvian town where he lives. About fishing, the lifeblood of the town. And about change, which is not always the same as progress. Stories about the first people to inhabit the region and stories about the people who live there now. Stories about the early peopleÕs love of the land and more recent peopleÕs destruction of it. Stories about how people used to get along with one another and stories about how things got to be so bad that the government began to murder its own citizens. Don Morales is a wise man. But he is also a sad man, mourning the loss of the past, of better times, of brotherhood. With his short, evocative storiesÑtold with simplicity and beautyÑhe pulls his readers closer to him, as if he were speaking directly to us. For the good fishermen of Tancay, life was better yesterday than it is today. It was better to live in harmony with the sea. When they lived in harmony with the natural world, there was harmony in the human world, too. With a nostalgic feel, yet reflecting PeruÕs current political instability, this is a delightful book with an important message. When the natural order is disrupted, it is not only fish that die. When nature dies, so might we all.

The haunting debut novel by the Bram Stoker Award-winning author—“think Henry James and Joyce Carol Oates with just a few paragraphs of Joe Lansdale” (Tor.com). For the last few years, Veronica Croydon has been at the center of scandal, first as the younger woman for whom her famous professor left his wife, and then as his apparent widow. When a writer staying at the same vacation home as Veronica has the chance to hear her story, he jumps at it. What follows takes him to the dark heart of a father's troubled relationship with his only son, in a story that stretches from the Hudson Valley to Afghanistan; and from post-9/11 America to Victorian England. House of Windows is a haunting exploration of a marriage under strain from forces both psychological and paranormal. With its combination of literary complexity and chilling supernatural violence, it is widely considered a masterpiece of contemporary horror fiction. New introduction by Adam Nevill Reading Group Guide included “John Langan is a writer of superb literary horror. Both House of Windows and The Fisherman are dark and unsettling contemporary masterpieces.” —Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author

Few New Testament characters are as fascinating as Simon Barjona, the man called Peter-a reluctant disciple who changed the face of Christianity. For more than twenty-five years, author and pastor Larry Huntsperger has spent hundreds of hours studying New Testament documents in preparation for writing this fictional first-person account of the life of this enigmatic disciple. The result is a novel that faithfully follows Scripture while offering a powerful, fresh narration of the story of one of Christianity's greatest men. In the fast-paced chapters of The Fisherman, readers will relive Peter's initial resistance to the pull he feels toward Jesus and his ministry. They'll walk with Peter alongside Jesus through the events of the Gospels and catch intimate glimpses of the disciples' personalities. They'll even "feel" the dust on the roads as familiar stories are transformed into original, spellbinding accounts from Peter's life. This fascinating novel will help readers "to see the Master as a man. For, if we cannot see him correctly as man, we have no hope of understanding him correctly as our God."

New York Public Library Best of 2022 A gripping, twisting account of a small town set on fire by hatred, xenophobia, and ecological disaster—a story that weaves together corporate malfeasance, a battle over shrinking natural resources, a turning point in the modern white supremacist movement, and one woman’s relentless battle for environmental justice. “Riveting…it has a little of everything that a thrilling story needs. It feels quite prescient, as if something we’re living out now, you can see scenes of it then. A gripping book that deserves a wide readership.”--George Packer, author of The Unwinding By the late 1970s, the fishermen of the Texas Gulf Coast were struggling. The bays that had sustained generations of shrimpers and crabbers before them were being poisoned by nearby petrochemical plants, oil spills, pesticides, and concrete. But as their nets came up light, the white shrimpers could only see one culprit: the small but growing number of newly resettled Vietnamese refugees who had recently started fishing. Turf was claimed. Guns were flashed. Threats were made. After a white crabber was killed by a young Vietnamese refugee in self-defense, the situation became a tinderbox primed to explode, and the Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan saw an opportunity to stoke the fishermen’s rage and prejudices. At a massive Klan rally near Galveston Bay one night in 1981, he strode over to an old boat graffitied with the words U.S.S. VIET CONG, torch in hand, and issued a ninety-day deadline for the refugees to leave or else “it’s going to be a helluva lot more violent than Vietnam!” The white fishermen roared as the boat burned, convinced that if they could drive these newcomers from the coast, everything would return to normal. A shocking campaign of violence ensued, marked by burning crosses, conspiracy theories, death threats, torched boats, and heavily armed Klansmen patrolling Galveston Bay. The Vietnamese were on the brink of fleeing, until a charismatic leader in their community, a highly decorated colonel, convinced them to stand their ground by entrusting their fate with the Constitution. Drawing upon a trove of never-before-published material, including FBI and ATF records, unprecedented access to case files, and scores of firsthand interviews with Klansmen, shrimpers, law enforcement, environmental activists, lawyers, perpetrators and victims, Johnson uncovers secrets and secures confessions to crimes that went unsolved for more than forty years. This explosive investigation of a forgotten story, years in the making, ultimately leads Johnson to the doorstep of the one woman who could see clearly enough to recognize the true threat to the bays—and who now represents the fishermen’s last hope.

Illus. in full color. Five fishermen go out in a boat and think that only four come back, until they realize the silly counting mistake they have made.