Kicking Tongues

Karen King-Aribisala transposes Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales into modern Nigeria, where a cast of 40 characters on a bus trip from Lagos to Abuja are archetypes of everyday Nigerians. Featuring a huge range of people from paupers to chiefs, a prostitute and a foreign proprietor of a British umbrella company, Kicking Tongues traverses the political and sociological realities facing an oil-rich Nigeria that prefers to import most things – including and especially religion in the form of Christianity. The latter being proposed as a solution to the country’s woes turns out to be the most surprising element of this generally thought-provoking novel.