Winner of the Valco Fund Literary Award for Fiction and the Ghana Book Award
Search Sweet Country follows the lives of an eclectic, interconnected group of Ghanaians living in and around the sprawling, chaotic city of Accra in the mid-1970s. Bringing the city to life in dizzying, lyrical prose, Laing weaves a story filled with bizarre and often melancholy characters: an idealistic professor, a lovely young witch, a wide-eyed student, a corrupt politician and his hack sidekick, a business-savvy young woman, a healer, a bishop and a crazy man intent on founding his own village. Their collective narratives create a portrait of a country where colonialism is dying, but democracy remains elusive. Search Sweet Country is a timeless, near-forgotten gem by a virtuosic writer, as necessary now as when the book was first published. Like Joyce's Dublin and Dickens's London, Laing's Accra brims with both lush specificity and universal relevance.

Search Sweet Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Laing, Kojo

Literary

Penguin Classics

Search Sweet Country (Heinemann African Writers)

Contemporary

Heinemann

Woman of the Aeroplanes

What Is it about?  Critically acclaimed Ghanaian author Kojo Laing's second novel takes the reader on a fantastic journey filled with unforgettable characters and magical places.  Laing imaginatively manipulates the English language, stretching it so that it is able to reflect his unique worldview. This unforgettable story, arcing between the twin sister towns of Tukwan in Ghana and Levensvale in Scotland, challenges every conception of what fiction should or could be about. With an introduction by Ellah Allfrey...Ellah Allfrey is the deputy editor of the literary magazine, Granta.  She has distinguished herself as an advocate for innovative writing and was a judge for the 2010 Caine Prize.

Heinemann Educational Books

Villagers from the magical community of Tukwan in the Asante region of Ghana travel to their sister city, Levensvale, in Scotland

William Morrow & Co.

Search Sweet Countryone of the greatest novels ever to come out of the African continentfollows the lives of an eclectic and inextricably interconnected group of Ghanaians living in and around the sprawling, chaotic city of Accra in the mid-1970s. Bringing to life the bustling markets and bars in dizzying, lyrical prose, Laing weaves a story filled with bizarre and often melancholy characters: an idealistic professor, a lovely young witch, a wide-eyed student, a corrupt politician and his hack sidekick, a business-savvy young woman, a healer, a bishop, a crazy man intent on founding his own village. Their collective narratives create a portrait of a country where colonialism is dying, but democracy remains elusive. Search Sweet Country is a timeless, near-forgotten gem by a virtuosic writer whose bold and bawdy voice and deep wisdom are as necessary now as they were when the book was first published. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Dickens’s London, Laing’s Accra brims with both lush specificity and universal relevance. First published in 1986, this new edition comes beautifully packaged and with a foreword by Binyavanga Wainaina, winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing, and director of the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Literature and Languages at Bard College.

Search Sweet Country

United States

McSweeney's

Die Sonnensucher

Edition Buechergilde GmbH

A long-awaited novel from one of Africa¿s best regarded writers. He is a poet, but best known as a novelist, original and imaginative. His writing is described as fundamentally African, and specifically Ghanaian in source. Witty narrative and dark humour dominate this new novel in which an Anglican Bishop works scientifically and doctrinally with different types of sharks, an ecumenically minded Pope loves boxing over the telephone, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is powerless to stop genetic experiments which make the interaction between rich and poor countries almost impossible. Kojo Laing is the author of Search Sweet Country, Women of the Aeroplanes, and Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars.

Big Bishop Roko and the Alter Gangsters

Woeli Publishing Services

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