My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

By Amos Tutuola

Book Overview

Amos Tutuola's second novel recounting the fate of mortals who stray into the world of ghosts, now available in a standalone volume with an introduction by Kaveh Akbar

First published in 1954, now acclaimed as a modern classic, and named one of TIME's "100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time," My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is the second novel by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola. A small boy finds himself lost in the heart of an impenetrable African forest, populated with fantastical beings and ghosts. As every hunter and traveler knows, it is almost impossible to leave the bush--yet the appearance of the television-handed ghostess may offer him a rare opportunity for escape. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a masterpiece of the surreal that blends Tutuola's native Yoruba culture with the encroaching influences of British and Christian colonialism in West Africa, a picaresque and darkly funny journey that is unique in literature.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802164005
• ISBN13: 9780802164001
• Release Date: June 2025
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Magical Realism at it's Best

This is a fantastic book and a milestone in post-postmodern/poststructuralist literature using the techniques of Magical Realism. As a Google search will turn up, Magical Realism expresses the nostalgia of global modernity for the traditional worlds it has vanquished and subsumed. Far from representing an alternative to or a subversion of an emergent world order, magical realism is both an effect of and a vehicle for globalization, itself only the latest phase of a centuries-long process of modernization. At one time understood to be mainly, if not exclusively, a Latin American phenomenon, magical realism has emerged over the last three decades as an artistic movement of international significance. As writers from Latin America, North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East have joined a literary movement attracting an ever widening international audience, the magical realist novel has arguably become the preeminent form of fiction in the contemporary world. Tutuola's myth's come from the Yoruba religious tradition and mythology of Nigeria. The neat synopsis normally given for a realist novel is unattainable in this type of work because the story is mediated to us only through loose and oten disjointed plots and pieces of stories intricately conjoined. It consists of several stoires within a story-of the main story with a journey motif and with digressions that are philosophical, sociological, psycholgoical, historical and religious in their discursive origins. The thread, in a sequence of sporadic happenings throughout the whole stretch of the main character's journey of discovery, weaves its way along, tying together the scattered and floating story lines, events and difuse epsisodes. Myths and local beliefs are part of the real, life-world, not that they exist next to the real world This is serous fiction and not merely escapist.