You can listen to the Book Summary Below
Somkelechukwu (Sommy) Nwachukwu arrives in the blinding heat of Iowa to begin a graduate program at James Crowley University, met by her new roommate, Bayo, a man she initially finds shorter than expected based on his boisterous phone persona. While standing at the airport exit, Sommy witnesses a woman holding a cardboard sign that reads “WELCOME HOME MY LYING SNIVELING CHEATING HUSBAND,” a spectacle of private pain that Bayo views with a mix of mischief and judgmental validation. As they drive toward their small, modern apartment, Bayo engages in a constant stream of talk, describing his generous American classmates, his church experiences, and his views on gender dynamics, including a “lazy posturing” regarding feminism. Sommy, however, is physically and emotionally exhausted from her twenty-four-hour journey and is preoccupied with her brother, Mezie, who has recently attempted suicide and has stilled himself toward her since the event. Upon reaching their new home, Sommy discovers that Bayo has already claimed the larger bedroom and the only storage room, an early sign of his need to establish ownership in their shared living space. Bayo attempts to cheer her up by explaining Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and how Iowa’s gloomy winters can lead to depression, but Sommy remains distant, identifying him as the type of roommate who might lack boundaries.
Sommy’s early days in America are defined by a sense of displacement and isolation, as the clinical, glassy architecture of the university buildings fails to meet her expectations of castle-like structures. She feels like an interloper who has “sneaked into the country,” a position she believes would have been better suited for her best friend, Amara, or her brother, Mezie, both of whom harbored deep dreams of American life. Her grief over Mezie is compounded by his refusal to answer her WhatsApp messages or calls, a silence that her mother and Patrick, Mezie’s friend, advise her to respect. To combat her sadness, Sommy attempts to immerse herself in the social life of the university, attending a Black Graduate Students Org (BGSO) mixer with Bayo. At the gathering, she meets Kayla, a thin girl with blonde-dyed eyebrows, and Michael, a Gambian student who irritates Bayo and Kayla with his arguments about Burna Boy vs. Wizkid and his questions about navigating cultural differences within Black organizations. During the meeting, Sommy is forced to leave the table to hide a fit of hysterical laughter triggered by Michael’s behavior, leading her to a dark spot near a water sprinkler. There, she has a brief, pleasant interaction with a small boy named Liam, which is abruptly and coldly interrupted by his mother, a woman who pulls him away with a look of stiff contempt. This microaggression leaves Sommy feeling numb and embarrassed, until an anxious-looking biracial man named Bryan Harris approaches her, declaring himself a “witness” to the woman’s “fucked up” behavior.
The academic semester begins with a grueling pace, as Sommy struggles to keep up with three full books a week and the eloquent, performative class discussions of her peers. Her classmates frequently engage in “contests of literacy,” referencing Foucault, Derrida, and Latour, as well as Russian masters like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Driven by a desire to belong, Sommy begins to perform intelligence, practicing her delivery in front of a camera and buying “edgy” clothing from Goodwill to fit the graduate student aesthetic. This performance reaches a peak during a discussion on the Kantian Sublime, where Sommy’s attempt at an eloquent contribution is patronizingly “translated” by a chubby-faced brunette classmate. This incident causes Sommy to retreat into herself, feeling a “caustic fume” of resentment that colors her experiences in other classes like Transnational Feminism and Modern Loneliness. Seeking a different kind of relief, she enters into a physical relationship with Bayo during a particularly cold period of the Iowa winter. Their sexual connection is desperate and coarse, eventually evolving into a routine where they share stories of their Nigerian childhoods and listen to nostalgic music like Styl-Plus and Plantashun Boiz. Despite this intimacy, Sommy does not see a long-term future with Bayo, viewing their bond as one born of shared desperation and loneliness rather than “mystique”.
Sommy’s life becomes increasingly complicated when she reconnects with Bryan Harris at a New Year’s Eve party hosted by a classmate named Ralph. Bryan, who had ghosted her for weeks after their initial meeting, explains that he had an emergency in Atlanta involving his brother. Despite her initial anger, Sommy finds herself drawn to him again, and they begin dating formally. Bryan is a writer working on a “sprawling” seven-hundred-page novel that explores the theme of a protagonist finding his father, a reflection of Bryan’s own life as a fatherless child. As her relationship with Bryan deepens, Sommy feigns an interest in abstract painting, spending her stipend on art supplies to prove her own dedication to a creative craft. She struggles with the “cowardice” of her refusal to tell Bayo about Bryan, fearing the potential heartbreak and the loss of her housing stability. This deception implodes when Sommy and Bryan run into Bayo at a CVS downtown, leading to a tense, awkward confrontation. Later that night, a drunken and resentful Bayo visits Sommy’s room and initiates a final sexual encounter; during the act, he uses Sommy’s phone to call Bryan, forcing him to listen to their intimacy as an act of “revenge porn”. Bryan is devastated, sending Sommy messages of disbelief and pain.
In the wake of this betrayal, Sommy is consumed by shame and reaches out to Melinda, Bryan’s friend, to help facilitate a reconciliation. Bryan eventually agrees to give their relationship another chance on the condition that Sommy moves out of Bayo’s apartment and in with him. Their shared life in Bryan’s apartment matures into a routine of evening walks and grocery shopping, but it is shadowed by Bryan’s anxiety about his father and Sommy’s fear of the “state of her brother’s life” back in Nigeria. Sommy eventually encourages Bryan to use an old address he found to search for his father, and she offers to accompany him on a journey back to Nigeria. They arrive in Lagos in April, where Sommy is immediately struck by the sensory overload of the city the heat, the traffic, and the “hordes of black overheating bodies”. They stay at Mezie’s new three-bedroom bungalow in Graceland Estate, a home funded entirely by their mother to help Mezie “get on his feet” following his deportation from Norway. Sommy is heartened to find Mezie looking healthy and bright-eyed, though she soon detects an underlying “odd anxiety” and a “closed-off slouch” in his behavior.
The search for Bryan’s father leads them to a duplex in Amawbia, where they meet a woman who confirms that the man living there is indeed Dr. Chike Diobi, Bryan’s biological father. However, the reunion is not the blissful event Bryan hoped for; Dr. Diobi is suffering from advanced dementia and possesses “vacuous” eyes that hold no recognition of his son. Bryan is left broken, feeling “as hollow as I’d arrived,” and he sobs as the man who doesn’t know his name tries to comfort him with a rhythmic tapping on his back. Back in Lagos, the family prepares for a grand thanksgiving party organized by Sommy’s mother to silence neighborhood rumors about Mezie’s “failure”. The tension reaches a boiling point when Mezie’s Norwegian girlfriend, Elin, discovers that Mezie has been maintaining a secret relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Chisom, who even sewed identical dresses for herself, Elin, and Sommy for the event. Elin storms out of the house into the night, leading Mezie, Sommy, and Bryan on a frantic search through the streets of Ojo. During this high-speed pursuit, a drunk and panicked Mezie hits a woman with the car.
Following the accident, Sommy and her mother orchestrate a massive cover-up, instructing Mezie to tell the police and doctors that they merely found the woman on the side of the road after another car hit her. Bryan is a horrified witness to this deception, watching as Sommy unflinchingly lies to Dr. Okoye and the police. The woman, identified later as Christie, falls into a coma and eventually dies, an event that Sommy’s mother handles by offering a bribe to the DPO and providing money for the funeral expenses. Sommy visits Christie’s sister, Judith, seeking penance, but Judith’s quiet resignation and grace only deepen Sommy’s sense of guilt. Bryan is repulsed by the “family’s mad drama” and the universal lack of “common decency” in the face of a crime, leading him to move into the guest room and eventually a hotel until their return to America. Despite this massive fracture, Bryan proposes marriage upon their return to Iowa, telling Sommy, “We need this. I’m positive we need this”.
They get married at the Johnson County courthouse and receive a Chicago condo as a wedding gift from Bryan’s mother, Catherine. However, the marriage is hollow; Bryan retreats into his study for weeks, entering a “state” of manic writing. The ultimate betrayal is revealed when Bryan publishes an essay titled “Notes from a Strange Land” in a prestigious publication called The Claim. In the essay, Bryan mines the details of the hit-and-run and their marriage, characterizing Sommy as a “product of an uncivilized society” who is ” familiar with chaos” and “irresolute” regarding morality. He describes his love for her as being “mired in pity” and labels her a “spectator” who is too scared of the stage of her own life. Devastated and “flayed of the scales” of her illusions, Sommy leaves Bryan and returns to Nigeria. She uses her share of the money from the condo sale to purchase a duplex in Agbara and begins the process of building an all-girls school. She finds a new sense of purpose in the prospect of being a “thereness” for young girls, providing them with a home and a place to learn that “it’s okay for things to come and go”. The book concludes with Sommy living in Agbara, finding a quiet pride in her father’s approval and a slow “clearing out a path for hope” in her dreams.
