No One Dies Yet is a genre-defying literary novel about three Americans visiting Ghana and the two very different tour guides who work to show them a complex place and the foreigners’ strange position in the country. It is 2019 and Elton, Vincent, and Scott have come to Ghana for the Year of Return. The two narrators, Kobby and Nana, are their tour guides: Kobby, a writer and Instragram book reviewer who might be able to show them the underground queer scene, and Nana, who wants to protect the travellers from the dangers he sees with his religious beliefs and sense of tradition.
This is an epic and experimental book, told through two narrators who paint very different pictures of what happens, and whose tense relationship forms a weird centre to the narrative. There’s an awful lot packed into the story, from biting critique of a range of people and actions to literary fiction jokes about what African literature that becomes popular in the US and UK has to be and who should read it. The main looming event is murder, teased from the start, but it isn’t as simple as a murder story, and there’s some fascinating layers to what goes on, particularly around queerness and survival. Woven throughout is Ghanian history and ideas of who tells it and what they engage with, and the book doesn’t have any easy answers to its questions. Then there’s the characters and their own experiences: of queerness, of race, and how they view the world.
It feels a bit meta to be writing an online review of a book that is by and about an online book reviewer, but the book also has some jokes about that world mixed in, with plenty of dark humour amongst the issues it explores. It is a book trying to subvert your ideas about what it is, whilst also questioning why you had those ideas in the first place.
Fiendfully Reading 
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