The Night Hides with a Knife

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"A respectable collection of short stories written in elegant and piquant style and demonstrates profound insight into human psychology."

"With this first collection of short stories, Nduka Otiono takes us on an impressive, multi-textual journey of resourcefulness and creativity that combines the best of the oral and scribal in Nigeria literary culture: traditional storytelling strategies and conventional narrative forms are overlaced with a fragmentary, postmodern reflexivity; the voice propels the pen, only to get trapped in the tape recorder."

"...a synthesis of the archetypal forms of the oral tradition with modern urban realism."

"The issue in Nigerian fiction is no longer that of good and evil. Our experience in the postmodern and postcolonial times has driven us to beyond those fringes. As The Night Hides with a Knife has clearly symbolized, the issue is that of the beautiful and the ugly, the dark and the light, a distinction which must remain foregrounded in the consciousness of every Nigerian in order to remind us of our vanishing beauty and dream as a people."

"...challenges the stereotype notion that modern African prose lacks experimental forms. The...collection defies, and indeed straddles genre classification."

"Several years of craftsmanship have transformed the ten short stories in this collection into gems of chiseled prose...In these stories, we see the dreams of an entire generation reaching up for the lights or sinking into the fetid swamp of the nation's grave."

"There is...a deeply autobiographical tenor in the short stories, for they tend to proclaim the geography of Otiono's times... The greatest achievement...is his deep and significant power of observation, in the surprising detail of his narrative."

"The Night Hides with a Knife is a collection of familiar and somewhat absurd experiences...Nduka Otiono is unique because his exploration of experiences is stylized. In essence, he is a stylist at heart: manner matters a lot to him."

"Otiono's painstaking assemblage of the loom of existence with its strands drawn from the nation's socio-political realities is the staple of everyday life... By giving free reign to his imagination and inventiveness and by drawing on the rich and time-tested resources of the oral tradition and heritage of African literature, Otiono makes The Night Hides with a Knife an irresistible work in the narrative genre."

"Otiono's ability to capture true life experiences manifests in stories like 'A Will to Survive', 'Wings of Rebellion'..."

- Sunday Times

"These stories are experimental, displaying an awareness of modern currents and a delicate narrative sensitivity to autochthonous structures... Part of the assets [the author] displays are his sharp, smooth-flowing prose and his sense of adventure and experimentation...He is at his best when exploiting the structures of oral performance."