Isara: A Voyage Around “Essay.”

Following on his Nobel Prize-winning autobiographical Ake, Nigeria's master writer limns a magisterial portrait of his father, in a fictionalized account of his central role in a chieftaincy struggle in his Yoruba town. Like Ake, Isara gently illuminates the often ambiguous relationship between Africans and the West; the same confident rendering of punctilious Western embroidery upon the rich fabric of Africa that permeated the earlier book continues to evoke pleasure and nostalgia for another era.