The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi

A dazzling, genre-defying novel in verse from the author that Delia Owens says ”tackles the absurdities, injustices, and corruption of a continent”

“A beautiful work of integration that not only refuses distinctions between ‘high art’ and traditional storytelling, but supplies that all-too-rare human necessity: the sense that life has meaning.” —The Guardian

In his first lyrical epic, Booker Prize finalist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o tells the story of the founding of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya from a strongly feminist perspective. In what The New Yorker calls “an epic poem rivalling the Iliad in body count and surpassing it in whimsy,” this verse narrative blends folklore, mythology, adventure, and allegory. After Gĩkũyũ and his wife Mũmbi ask God to find partners for their ten beautiful daughters—called “The Perfect Nine”—men start to appear the next day. In this “vivid, exhilarating tale” (Daily Mail), the family sets a series of challenges and tasks for 99 suitors who seek the daughters’ hands in marriage, to slowly cull them down to a fateful ten. What ensues is a “beautifully told epic” (The New Statesman) with all the elements of adventure—suspense, danger, humor, and sacrifice.

Written by the leading African novelist, who was annually tipped to win the Nobel Prize in Literature before his passing, The Perfect Nine is a quest for the beautiful as an ideal of living and as an allegory for the motivating force behind migrations of African peoples. As the author noted, “The epic came to me one night as a revelation of ideals of quest, courage, perseverance, unity, family; and the sense of the divine, in human struggles with nature and nurture.”