Harry Sylvester Bird Audiobook By Chinelo Okparanta cover art

Harry Sylvester Bird

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Harry Sylvester Bird

By: Chinelo Okparanta
Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
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From the award-winning author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water comes a brilliant, provocative, up-to-the-minute novel about a young white man’s education and miseducation in contemporary America.

Harry Sylvester Bird grows up in Edward, Pennsylvania, with his parents, Wayne and Chevy, whom he greatly dislikes. They’re racist, xenophobic, financially incompetent, and they have quite a few secrets of their own. To Harry, they represent everything wrong with this country. And his small town isn’t any better. He witnesses racial profiling, graffitied swastikas, and White Power signs on his walk home from school. He can’t wait until he’s old enough to leave. When he finally is, he moves straight to New York City, where he feels he can finally live out his true inner self.

In the city, he meets and falls in love with Maryam, a young Nigerian woman. But when Maryam begins to pull away, Harry is forced to confront his identity as he never has before—if he can.

Brilliant, funny, original, and unflinching, Harry Sylvester Bird is a satire that speaks to all the most pressing tensions and anxieties of our time—and of the history that has shaped us and might continue to do so.

©2022 Chinelo Okparanta (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers African American Coming of Age Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Social justice Witty Funny
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I loved Under the Udala Trees so much, a top 10 book for me for sure, so I knew I’d read anything else Okparanta wrote.

I should start off that I hated Heart of Darkness and don’t care for Conrad at all. But this was an epic satire and probably the weirdest book I’ve ever read. It felt deeply relevant, deeply literary, and somehow worked.

Excellent audio performance as well.

The weirdest (in a good way) book!

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The foils are created by checking off a list of every prejudice—gender, race, economic, religion . . . resulting in flat characters and general predictability.

Written for the “unwoke”

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