New York My Village

New York, My Village is the debut novel by Nigerian author Uwem Akpan. Published in November 2021 by W. W. Norton & Company, the novel set in the United States and Nigeria centers on Ekong Udosoro, a Nigerian editor and winner of the Toni Morrison Publishing Company. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality in New York City, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly―callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile neighbors, and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food.

New York, My Village, at the same time, is renowned for its depiction of the brutal woes of the minorities of the Niger Delta in the Biafran War (1967 to 1970). Reckoning with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong's people were a minority of minorities caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekong's life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. The great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collective antagonism toward the "other" consumes Ekong's daily life. Yet in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese and Latino and African American, and in bonding with his true allies at work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there is still hope in sharing our stories.

Akpan's novel has been described by scholars as "Kafkaesque" and explores significant themes, such as racism, unbelonging, and war. The novel's astute depiction of the current pandemic of bedbug infestation in New York City, where Akpan was first bitten by the frightening crawlers, serves as a powerful imagery and metaphor for the deep‑seated racism that the narrative cleverly parallels with the entrenched rut of tribalism, suggesting that both forms of prejudice burrow into society with the same stubborn persistence. The book brilliantly melds humor, tenderness, and pain to explore the myriad ways that tribalisms define life everywhere, from the villages of Nigeria to the villages within New York City. In this sense, Uwem Akpan's, New York, My Village is a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the life-sustaining power of community across borders and across boroughs. The novel was shortlisted for the 2022 ANA Chinua Achebe Prize for Literature and was longlisted for the 2025 Nigeria Prize for Literature.