Widely considered to be his masterpiece, Amos Tutuola’s debut novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard was first published in 1952. Named one of TIME’s “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time” and introduced here by Wole Soyinka, the novel tells the phantasmagorical story of a wealthy alcoholic who drinks 225 kegs of palm wine a day. When the man’s personal tapster dies and leaves him without any remaining supply of alcohol, the man desperately follows the tapster into the nightmarish Dead’s Town. Drawing on Yoruba folklore and narrated with a unique voice that mixes West African oral traditions with the Colonial British English that Tutuola learned at school, The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a seminal work of African literature from one of Nigeria’s most influential writers and an important part of the global literary canon.

Praise for The Palm-Wine Drinkard:

“Tutuola’s art conceals—or rather clothes—his purpose, as all good art must do.”—Chinua Achebe

“Bracingly original in its voice and ideas.”—Elijah Wolfson, TIME, “The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time”

“What I love about The Palm-Wine Drinkard is how its language simultaneously has the sophistication of Joyce and the stammering of an actual drunk . . . It’s all over the place. The syntax is utterly uncanny and strange. The structure is deeply disorienting. It’s just so radically itself . . . [Tutuola] doesn’t sound like anyone else. He sounds like himself. He sounds like his own utterly unprecedented experience of life on the planet Earth . . . That’s the ambition of every writer—to articulate an unprecedented consciousness. And you’d be hardpressed to find anyone who does that better than Tutuola.”—Kaveh Akbar, Publishers Weekly

“Brief, thronged, grisly, and bewitching.”—Dylan Thomas, The Observer

“That mythic dimension is what I’m most interested in—the way [Tutuola] blends the supernatural world seamlessly with the human reality.”—Chigozie Obioma, Financial Times