The Count’s False Banquet

FICTION

The Count’s False Banquet

Benjamin Kwakye concludes his trilogy on the modern African migrant’s experience in America with another dazzling medley of language, plot, and outreach to our common humanity.  In this final instalment, Count Tutu leaves his native Ghana to come to the United States seeking the feast of the famed American Dream.  His anticipated banquet of dreams sours, however, when he is at once welcomed and rejected, torn by external and internal conflicts, soothed by the promise of romance (both literal and figurative), and inflicted with other deep emotional wounds with far reaching consequences.  With the spacious array of the immigrant experience for a canvass, The Count’s False Banquet paints an impressive portrait of the pain of self-imposed banishment from home, the contradictory inescapable boundlessness and restrictions of longing, hope and desire, and the expansiveness of human will.

Praise for Kwakye

  “Kwakye is the master of haunting fiction, with narratives rocking back and front…”

 – Sun Literary Times

“Kwakye’s novel towers above others … as an intricately structured work of literature that sustains the reader’s interest by manipulating modern and traditional story-telling devices in a captivating manner.”

–Commonwealth Writers Prize Citation

“Benjamin Kwakye…has already earned the reputation of being 'one of the most accomplished of the new breed of African novelists

–Eustace Palmer
(Reading Contemporary African Literature)

“Multi award-winning author Benjamin Kwakye pens an incredible …work”

—Manhattan Book Review

“[A] moving and readable story in which one individual’s choices and experiences speak for wider and more universal concerns, encompassing radical upheaval and personal development, crossing borders, crossing continents.”

– New Internationalist

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Benjamin Kwakye was born in Accra, Ghana.  He is the winner of two Commonwealth Prize for Literature Book Awards for his novels The Clothes of Nakedness and The Sun by Night. Kwakye is also the author of five other novels, a novella collection, a short story collection, and an epic poem. His other literary awards include the 2011 IPPY Gold Award for Adult Multicultural Fiction. He attended Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, and is a director of The Africa Education Initiative, dedicated to promoting science education in Africa.  Kwakye currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife, Margaret, and children, Nana Shira, Jeede, and Kristodia.

ISBN 978-0-9978689-3-7

Cover Art/Image by Bruce Onobrakpeya