Petals of Blood - Paperback

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (Author), Moses Isegawa (Introduction by), Chinua Achebe (Editor)

"The definitive African book of the twentieth century" (Moses Isegawa, from the Introduction) by the Nobel Prize-nominated Kenyan writer

The puzzling murder of three African directors of a foreign-owned brewery sets the scene for this fervent, hard-hitting novel about disillusionment in independent Kenya. A deceptively simple tale, Petals of Blood is on the surface a suspenseful investigation of a spectacular triple murder in upcountry Kenya. Yet as the intertwined stories of the four suspects unfold, a devastating picture emerges of a modern third-world nation whose frustrated people feel their leaders have failed them time after time.

First published in 1977, this novel was so explosive that its author was imprisoned without charges by the Kenyan government. His incarceration was so shocking that newspapers around the world called attention to the case, and protests were raised by human-rights groups, scholars, and writers, including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Harold Pinter, and Margaret Drabble.

Author Biography

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1938-2025) was an award-winning novelist, playwright, and essayist from Kenya whose novels have been translated into more than thirty languages. In addition to Petals of Blood, his novels Devil on the Cross, A Grain of Wheat, The River Between, and Weep Not, Child are available from Penguin Classics.

Moses Isegawa (introduction) was born in Uganda and is the author of the novels Abyssinian Chronicles and Snakepit.