Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, has announced the publication of Chinelo Okparanta’s third novel, This Impossible Life. Reacting to the news on Instagram, the Nigerian-American writer described the novel as being as intimate as her first work of fiction. According to Brittle Paper, she wrote:
“Although it’s fiction, this book draws from some of my lived experiences—from growing up in a turbulent Nigeria to relocating to the US. Like Ava, I have suffered the kind of deeply experienced anxiety that results in my faulty mind’s attempt to control the ostensibly uncontrollable. And, like Mumsie, I am learning the sacrifices that come with motherhood.”
In her post, she also described how her relationship with her brother, particularly the empathy she feels for him when he falls ill, helped shape Alohan’s character.
The novel follows siblings and spans Nigeria and the United States, moving through grief, migration, and the particular psychic weight of lives lived between worlds. Okparanta also revealed that the book features sex workers and offered a characteristically candid explanation. While she has never worked as a sex worker in Europe, she noted that she has been propositioned more than once during her travels across the continent. One of the people who propositioned her convinced her that she was serious. “Writer that I am,” she wrote, “I have imagined the life circumstances that could have led me to that path.” It is the kind of detail that signals a novel unafraid of the full texture of its characters’ lives.
A synopsis of the novel reads:
“Eleven-year-old Alohan and his four-year-old sister, Ivie, are the children of a rainmaker who performs elaborate rituals to bring or hold back the rain. One day, the rainmaker’s luck runs out: it pours on the wrong person’s wedding, and the repercussions for him—and for his wife, who accompanies him to the wedding—are deadly.”
Chinelo Okparanta was born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Her debut short-story collection, Happiness, Like Water, was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Her first novel, Under the Udala Trees, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection and was nominated for the Kirkus Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
She has won an O. Henry Prize and two Lambda Literary Awards and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. This Impossible Life is her first novel in several years and, judging by her announcement, perhaps her most personal work yet.
