The Palm-Wine Drinkard

About this book

Amos Tutuola's masterful first novel of a nightmarish quest into the land of the dead, now available in a standalone volume with an introduction by Wole Soyinka Widely considered to be his masterpiece, Amos Tutuola's debut novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard was first published in 1952. Named one of TIME's "100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time" and introduced here by Wole Soyinka, the novel tells the phantasmagorical story of a wealthy alcoholic who drinks 225 kegs of palm wine a day. When the man's personal tapster dies and leaves him without any remaining supply of alcohol, the man desperately follows the tapster into the nightmarish Dead's Town. Drawing on Yoruba folklore and narrated with a unique voice that mixes West African oral traditions with the Colonial British English that Tutuola learned at school, The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a seminal work of African literature from one of Nigeria's most influential writers and an important part of the global literary canon.

Details

Format

Paperback

ISBN-13

9780802164018

Publisher

Grove Press

Published

June 17, 2025

Pages

160

Weight

7 oz

Subject

Fiction