Hangman: Longlisted For Women's Prize For Fiction 2024

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LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024

‘A brilliantly surreal story of exile and homecoming’ GUARDIAN’S BOOK OF THE DAY

‘A slim, stark, and captivatingly enigmatic début’ NEW YORKER

A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years living in exile in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn’t recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone at the airport knows him-a man who calls him brother. As they travel to this man’s house, the purpose of his visit comes into focus: he is here to find his real brother, who is dying.

Hangman is his tragicomic journey through homecoming and loss. It is a hilarious and twisted odyssey, peopled by phantoms and tricksters, aid workers and taxi drivers, the relatives and riddles that lead this man along a circuitous path towards the truth. This is the strangely honest story of one man’s search for refuge-in this world and the one that lies beyond it.

*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TELEGRAPH, VULTURE, FRIEZE, BBC, READER’S DIGEST*

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MORE PRAISE FOR HANGMAN:

‘Urgent and emotionally resonant’ VOGUE

’Reinvents the novel of return… keeps you hooked’ MONICA ALI

‘Melancholic but weirdly hopeful’ FT

‘Remarkably assured and distinctive’ TLS

‘Laconic and darkly humorous’ FRIEZE

‘A striking masterful debut’ NAMWALI SERPELL

‘A bravura twist on the immigrant novel’ DAILY MAIL

‘Ruthlessly honest and startingly beautiful’ MAAZA MENGISTE

‘Daring, intellectually rich, and unsettlingly hilarious’ ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN

About the Author

Maya Binyam s work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, New York, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at the Paris Review and has previously worked as an editor at Triple Canopy and the New Inquiry, and as a lecturer in the New School s Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program. Hangman is her debut novel.