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This April, the Vox Book Club is reading The Death of Vivek Oji

Nigerian novelist Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji is ferocious and kaleidoscopic.

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The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi.
Riverhead
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.

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This April, the Vox Book Club is reading Akwaeke Emezi’s lovely, ferocious kaleidoscope of a novel, The Death of Vivek Oji. It’s a book that doesn’t cleanly fit into one genre or another: It’s a murder mystery of sorts, but it’s never quite clear that there’s been a murder. It’s also a love story, and it’s a coming of age story. It’s the story of a life, told in fragments.

Vivek Oji is a young Nigerian man who dies in the first sentence of the novel. As his mother becomes our detective, working desperately to find out what happened to her son, his cousin and lover Osita struggles with dark secrets, and Emezi slips fluently back and forth between Vivek’s life and his death.

The Death of Vivek Oji is a tricky, intricate book, and we’ll have tons to talk about. And at the end of the month, we’ll be meeting up with Akwaeke Emezi live on Zoom. You can RSVP now. I can’t wait to see you there.

Here’s the full Vox Book Club schedule for April 2021

Friday, April 16: Discussion post on The Death of Vivek Oji published to Vox.com

Thursday, April 29: Virtual live event with author Akwaeke Emezi at 5 pm ET. RSVP here.

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