Contents

PART ONE

  1 First Questions

  2 Pocket Watch or My Father Meets a Stranger on a Train

  3 How My Parents Met

  4 Map of the World, 1: The Tale of El-Edrisi

  5 My Parents Marry – War Breaks Out – I Am Conceived

  6 I Gestate, Listen, and – Finally – I Am Born

  7 Transcribing My Mother’s Diary

PART TWO

  8 Mother’s Silence

  9 Unnamed

10 Taiwo Meets Her End

11 In Lagos

12 Babatundi the Idiot Boy or How I Acquired My Name

13 Map of the World, 2: Massacre at Benin

14 ‘First Snow in Port Suez’

15 The Snow Queen

16 How I Developed My Powers of Listening

17 How I Abandoned Ade

18 The Pit

19 Nikolas, Leader of the Nightsoil Workers

20 How I Found My Way Home

21 Exile

PART THREE

22 The Hothouse

23 Father’s Madness and Death

24 Jesus the Jew or How My Father Acquired His Name

25 Transcribing Damaris’ Diary: Britain

26 Transcribing Damaris’ Diary: America

27 Tinnitus

28 Map of the World, 3: Ade’s Story

29 Last Visit to Mr Rafferty

30 Auto da Fé

Postscript

Acknowledgements