Travelers -

Helon Habila

W. W. Norton & Company

2019

288 páginas

9h 36m

ISBN-10: 0393239594

Accompanying his wife on a prestigious arts fellowship in Berlin, a Nigerian scholar finds there are no walls between his privileged, secure existence and the stories of other Africans on the move: among them: a transgender film student seeking the freedom to live an authentic life; a Libyan doctor who lost his wife and son in the waters of the Mediterranean; a Somalian shopkeeper who tried to save his young daughter from a marriage forced on her by an al- Shabab commander.

His sense of identity begins to dissolve as he can no longer separate himself from others’ horrors, and he realizes he is inextricably connected to those lives that have touched his. From a Berlin nightclub to a refugee deportation camp in Sicily to the London apartment of a Malawian poet, his empathy with the lives of other “travelers” brings him to a new journey, a reverse migration in pursuit of the universal dream of love and home.