Review: ‘The Beautiful Side Of The Moon’, by Leye Adenle

Blurb

Marking an exciting new departure by award-winning Nigerian author Leye Adenle (Easy Motion Tourist, When Trouble Sleeps), The Beautiful Side of the Moon raises an entirely unexpected and intriguing question – what would happen if God went on holiday?

In order to get a better understanding of what it’s like to be human, and to taste humanity’s joys and sorrows, God decides to have a holiday as a human being. During the course of his time off, though, he completely forgets that he’s God, which leads to some utterly unpredictable outcomes…

A delightful, playful, thoughtful adventure in speculative fiction by one of Nigeria’s most exciting new writers.

My Review

Thanks to Anne Cater, of Random Things Tours for organising the tour and to the publisher for supplying a copy of this book.

Osaretin Osagiemwenagbon is an IT bod in Lagos. Life, other than his father’s death while he was a teen, has been relatively dull. Until one day when he receives a handwritten note on purple paper. He meets a beautiful woman in a bar, and a strange man in a purple suit with an afro that hides many dimensions.

A world of weird opens up from then on. Osaretin is lost and confused, and really struggles with the information he’s learning. Until he doesn’t.

I read a few chapters at a time, stringing out the experience to make it last, but then I had to finish it, because this review was due. I thought I’d get at least the full weekend, with appropriate breaks, but no, I read the last quarter of the novel in two hours. It was addictive, and I just had to keep going.

This book reads like a mix of folk tale and literary fiction, which parallel Biblical stories, given a distinctive Nigerian twist. It’s very descriptive and colourful, I could see the office, taste the air of Lagos and feel the grit of the moon’s surface.

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About the Author

Leye is the winner of the first ever Prix Marianne in 2016, and is a Nigerian writer living and working in London. His short story, ‘The Assassination’, in the anthology Sunshine Noir, was a finalist for the 2017 CWA Short Story Dagger award. Leye comes from a family of writers, the most famous of whom (to date) was his grandfather, Oba Adeleye Adenle I, a former king of Oshogbo in South West Nigeria.