TREMOR

239pp., paperback, London, 2023

Tunde, the man at the centre of this novel, reflects on his life, from his West African upbringing to his current work as a teacher of photography at an American University.

"An intimate novel about destabilization and catastrophe, Tremor roves freely across time, form, geography. Supple and sinuous, it is a dazzling performance from one of the most brilliant and singular minds at work today." Katie Kitamura

"Mesmerising ... Tremor works as a labyrinthine history puzzle, a personal collage of memorable artworks, a photo-essay about lives and struggles in Lagos, and a spellbinding lecture on racism, provenance, decolonisation and restitution. How can a novel contain so many genres and so much information without being showy? Cole's prose has a calm, meditative voice that moves forward unobtrusively, as if the narrator only serves and observes, never directs. It has a hypnotic, transportive quality, an intellectual agility more akin to muscle memory than free association ... In Tremor he curates a masterclass in flash fiction portraitures and creates a buzzing Nigerian metropolis full of risk and allure. Although highly conceptual, Tremor is heartbreakingly tender ... this is a book that widens and unsettles the horizons of our 21st-century experience, with a vivid sense of the earth-shaking tremors under the surface of our shared lives and cultures." Kit Fan Guardian

Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 and raised in Nigeria. He is the author of the novel, Open City, the novella Every Day Is for the Thief, the collection of essays Known and Strange Things and the photobook Blind Spot. He has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the New York City Book Award, and the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction. His photography has been widely exhibited, and he was the Photography Critic of The New York Times Magazine. He is Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.