No One Dies Yet

Starred review from December 4, 2023
Three American gay men travel to Ghana to pay homage to their enslaved ancestors and explore the country’s queer underground scene in the audacious debut from Ghanaian book critic Ben Ben. Married couple Vincent and Scott and their constantly horny friend Elton are in Accra for the Year of Return, a 2019 government initiative encouraging tourism from Black diasporans. The trio are squired through the city and coastal forts by the novel’s primary narrators, both unreliable: Kobby, an aspiring novelist who met Elton through the dating app Man4Man, and Nana, who trawls Facebook in search of Americans who will help him get a visa. (The two regard each other with open disdain.) When local tabloids report that a serial killer is on the loose, the government responds with denials, afraid the news will scare away the “Returnees.” The men do indeed brush up against a murder, but to identify who ends up dead or why would spoil half the fun of this wildly inventive novel. Embedded within the deadly tale are interludes voiced by ghosts of the enslaved, unapologetically raunchy sex scenes, and skewering portrayals of nearly everyone Kobby encounters, including the publishers who reject his crime novel pitch and prefer fiction about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, cynical Europeans recolonizing former slave-trading outposts with resorts, and the tourists who condescend to their Ghanaian hosts while romanticizing long-past traditions. The sheer wonder of Ben Ben’s narrative design anchors the reader in the immersive maelstrom of voices. The results are propulsive and deliciously irreverent in equal measure.

Starred review from January 1, 2024
This cinematic, cutting, and smart debut novel follows a group of young men in Ghana during the Year of the Return, an event intended to gather members of the African diaspora on the home continent. Americans Elton, Vincent, and Scott follow the knowledge and lead of two locals (and opposites): devout Christian homophobe Nana and emo bookstagrammer Kobby. The five men journey across Ghana in a Homerian epic, unfurling the tangled truths of their varied African experiences. Kobby and Elton are hooking up, which shocks Nana. Scott and Vincent battle identity crises and culture clash. They visit colonial castles on the coast, their violent history triggering Kobby the most. Kobby (named for the author) and Nana (named for Ghana's president) tell the story from alternating, unreliable points of view. Kobby's dark past, deteriorating health, and work as a homicide reporter haunt the book's murder-mystery elements and drive the intensity to its delicious end. Kobby is extraordinarily smart and joyfully silly; any sentence can become a history lesson, a political roast, an imagined murder, a Macbeth reference, or a Natasha Bedingfield lyric. Ben Ben rejects prevailing colonial narratives with this graphic rock opera of murder, sex, and tourism.

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