Waiting for an Angel

Helon Habila · 2002 CE · Novel · Nigerian · Contemporary

Lomba, a young poet and sometime journalist in Lagos under the Abacha dictatorship, is jailed for his writing and drifts among friends, lovers and fellow dissidents in a city of blackouts and informers. The book is built from linked episodes rather than a single plot, and one of them grew from the Caine Prize story Love Poems. It is the best-known Nigerian novel of the military's last years.

Open Waiting for an Angel in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.

Attributes

Closest analogues

• Footsteps
  Pramoedya Ananta Toer · 1985 CE · Novel

  57% · 12 shared
  NovelPoliticalPower & CorruptionFreedom vs FateContemporaryEverymanRebel / OutlawChronicleThe PrisonThe Cityvs SocietyRealist
• Children of Men
  Alfonso Cuarón · 2006 CE · Film

  57% · 11 shared
  PoliticalPower & CorruptionHopeContemporaryEverymanRebel / OutlawThe PrisonThe Cityvs SocietyRealistElegiac
• Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
  James Baldwin · 1968 CE · Novel

  54% · 13 shared
  NovelPoliticalPsychologicalLoveContemporaryEverymanRebel / OutlawNonlinear / FracturedThe Cityvs Societyvs SelfRealistElegiac
• The Interpreters
  Wole Soyinka · 1965 CE · Novel

  54% · 12 shared
  NovelPsychologicalPower & CorruptionIsolation & AlienationContemporaryEverymanRebel / OutlawNonlinear / FracturedThe Cityvs Societyvs SelfNigerian
• The Late Bourgeois World
  Nadine Gordimer · 1966 CE · Novel

  54% · 12 shared
  NovelPoliticalPsychologicalFreedom vs FateContemporaryEverymanRebel / OutlawThe PrisonThe Cityvs Societyvs SelfRealist
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  Milan Kundera · 1984 CE · Novel

  54% · 12 shared
  NovelPoliticalPsychologicalFreedom vs FateLoveContemporaryEverymanNonlinear / FracturedThe Cityvs Societyvs SelfElegiac