The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

Trade paperback format.

Since its first publication in 1952, The Palm-Wine Drinkard has come to be regarded as the masterwork of one of Africa’s best and most influential writers. Drawing on the Yoruba oral folktale tradition, and embellishing his story with strong mythical and psychological implications, Tutuola describes the odyssey of a devoted palm-wine drinkard through a nightmare of fantastic adventure.

In My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the charm of his distinctive English blends with Nigerian Amos Tutuola’s extraordinary imagination and the mythology of West African tribal life to present a bewitching, nightmarish adventure story. A small boy, left alone to face the terrors of the bush, the impenetrable thickets of the topical forest inhabited only by ghosts, meets all the vile spirits of African mythology and is initiated into the worlds of fear, disease, and death. Tutuola uncannily evokes the awaking of a mortal soul in confrontation with the reality of a people’s world of legend.