**One of Timeās 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer**
An NPR Best Book of 2019
An āelectrifyingā (Publishers Weekly) debut novel from Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uneasy assimilation to American life.
Living in small-town Utah has always been an uncomfortable fit for Tunde Akinolaās family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he canāt escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black wonāt come off. As he struggles to fit in, he finds little solace from his parents who are grappling with their own issues.
Tundeās father, ever the optimist, works tirelessly chasing his American dream while his wife, lonely in Utah without family and friends, sinks deeper into schizophrenia. Then one otherwise-ordinary morning, Tundeās mother wakes him with a hug, bundles him and his baby brother into the car, and takes them away from the only home theyāve ever known.
But running away doesnāt bring her, or her children, any relief; once Tundeās father tracks them down, she flees to Nigeria, and Tunde never feels at home again. He spends the rest of his childhood and young adulthood searching for connectionāto the wary stepmother and stepbrothers he gains when his father remarries; to the Utah residents who mock his fatherās accent; to evangelical religion; to his Texas middle schoolās crowd of African-Americans; to the fraternity brothers of his historically black college. In so doing, he discovers something that sends him on a journey away from everything he has known.
Sweeping, stirring, and perspective-shifting, A Particular Kind of Black Man is āwild, vulnerable, livedā¦A study of the particulate self, the self as a constellation of moving partsā (The New York Times Book Review).