Books like The Palm-Wine Drinkard
What lingers is the appetite for another tale in which language seems freshly invented, the supernatural is ordinary fact, and every comic detour may open into wonder or terror.
If you liked The Palm-Wine Drinkard, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and we tell you exactly what.
Tutuola’s second novel is not merely more of the same; it pushes his distinctive storytelling into stranger, darker territory. A boy fleeing wartime chaos enters the Bush of Ghosts, where each encounter obeys its own alarming logic. The resulting journey has the same irresistible forward pull, abrupt transformations, grotesque comedy, and utter refusal to explain away marvels.
Above all, it offers more of Tutuola’s inimitable English: direct, rhythmical, and bent around the structures of oral narrative. Few writers make the impossible feel so concrete. Anyone captivated by the Drinkard’s adventures should not miss Tutuola’s other great descent into an inexhaustible spirit world.
Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child repeatedly drawn toward the world beyond life, yet he chooses to remain with his struggling parents. Through his eyes, a poor neighborhood becomes porous: political thugs, market crowds, animals, ancestors, and spirits all press into the same teeming reality.
Winner of the Booker Prize, Okri’s novel shares Tutuola’s confidence that unseen worlds need no rational defense, but its music is more lush and incantatory. Images accumulate with dreamlike intensity while hunger, family devotion, and political violence keep the vision grounded. It is a vast, hypnotic expansion of the possibilities Tutuola opened for the modern novel.
Ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby receives a hearing trumpet and discovers that her family plans to send her to an institution. From that wonderfully dry beginning, Carrington builds an adventure of escalating impossibility, populated by eccentric old women and governed by a logic that is at once mythic, comic, and gloriously insubordinate.
This cult classic shares Tutuola’s rarest gift: it does not decorate reality with fantasy but gleefully replaces reality’s rules. Carrington’s deadpan narration makes each new absurdity feel inevitable, while her surrealist imagination keeps overturning age, authority, religion, and decorum. Readers who loved the Drinkard’s unpredictable encounters will find another book that seems capable of becoming absolutely anything on the next page.