I Do Not Come To You By Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

Genre: Fiction - paperback. 339 pages; 2011. 

In an earlier post 2013 Reads, I put up a few books I would like to read this year. A couple of them are by a Nigerian author because I want to get to know more indigenous authors and their works.

While having lunch at Terra Kulture sometime ago with the hubs, we went over to the mini bookshop there and, lo and behold, they had mostly Nigerian authors. Yay !!
We ended up buying one by Nwaubani and a couple others by Sefi Atta (please find their review after this post).

I Do Not Come To You By Chance; A riveting story

A young man (Kingsley Ibe) has just graduated from university and has big dreams for himself to get a great job, rescue his family from poverty and get married to his university sweetheart. However, the realities of life and the very present difficulties of a corrupt nation, soon divests him of his lofty dreams. His girlfriend leaves him for a rich, older uneducated man at the same time his father collapses and his poor mother can not raise the finance to get him the treatment he needs. Kingsley finds himself going more and more to his uncle who finally recruits him into his line of internet fraud work, much to his mother's dismay.

The main characters in this book are very strong and original. However, the character I found most outstanding is Big Daddy; Kingsley's illiterate but extremely wealthy uncle. Big Daddy is a hilarious, rags-to-riches persona who eventually becomes a Gubernatorial aspirant. He provides a lot of comic relief throughout the story via his street smarts, wit, uncouth nature and use of biblical passages to assuage his indiscretions. 

This is one book I thoroughly enjoyed, from the impressive story telling by the author to the characterization, which is very much in keeping with Nigeria's socio-cultural dynamics. I'm quite sure every Nigerian who reads this book will find that there is one of each character in their home.