And the Hills Burned

Set sometime in 2002, And the Hills Burned tells the story of Chidi, a boy whose father – former Minister of Petroleum in the Nigerian Military administration of the early 90s, and current environmental activist – runs afoul of the military regime that had taken control of the country by the end of the 20th century. The family has no choice but to seek asylum in the States, three years after Chidi’s mother had died in a freak accident. But after six years of a relatively peaceful life in North Florida – and this is where the narrative begins – things start to unravel when Chidi’s aunt comes to spend the summer with them on St George Island. Chidi finds a letter and some documents, all pointing to a jarring truth: that his mother didn’t die that night nine years before, and whatever had become of her has much to do with Marist Academy, a notorious Catholic Missionary boarding school in Eastern Nigeria. Chidi gets to work, setting into motion a series of events that would land him back in Nigeria as an enrolled Marist student spending the holidays with his aunt. It is in Marist that he meets Virginia, and Jonah the only son of the American Ambassador to Nigeria, and everything he thought he once knew about his family and about himself is soon turned on its head. On a thematic level, this narrative explores immigration, and race, and the tyranny of power.