Farther Away and Out of Place and Other Stories

The thesis is a collection of literary fiction comprising a novella and three short stories and that deals with themes such as the intellectual life of the outsider, isolation, individualism, influence and power, independence, coming of age, and colonialism. In the novella “Farther Away and Out of Place”, Giles—a boomerang kid whose attempt to travel abroad so as to switch academic pursuits fails as he is denied a visa—accepts an offer by an old classmate, Crusoe, of an alternative way to travel abroad, only to wind up stranded on a deserted island. Alone, he becomes at once freed and imprisoned and must invent ways to occupy himself. “Boomerang” is two interwoven stories unfolding in reverse chronology—one being of a young Nigerian couple whose lives proceed in reverse from a car crash just after their wedding to the moment where they first met, at the same time as Nigeria’s existence as a republic is short-lived and it returns with fanfare to British colonial rule. In “Independence,” Wole’s relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Nkechi leads to an unplanned pregnancy that rocks his emergence into the independence that young adulthood promises. In “Stammering Lips and Another Tongue”, Wole, a graduate student in English, (not the same character as Wole in “Independence”) finds himself caught in between what two opposing characters—his unnamed professor and Laura, an editor at a top publishing house—think about the evolution of the English language.