Morayo Da Silva is a retired literature professor from Nigeria approaching her 75th birthday – “ancient” by her home country’s standards, having “outfoxed the female life expectancy by nearly two decades”. Living in a similarly “old but sturdy” apartment in San Francisco, she is surrounded by the debris that you accumulate in an ordinary life: papers, unopened bills, junk mail, books, unfinished mugs of tea. She has no family and likes her freedom. Then an accident at home forces her to spend lonely days in hospital and a nursing home. On the surface, it’s not the most vibrant life. But Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun is a novel that is profoundly dissatisfied with surfaces.
The Goldsmiths Prize sets out to “reward fiction that breaks the mould” and, as a result, it occasionally unearths buried gems. Ladipo Manyika’s novel, shortlisted for this year’s prize, fits the description. Published by Cassava Republic, a Nigerian imprint that launched in the UK this year, it received no reviews in the national newspapers. As the Goldsmiths judge Bernardine Evaristo has noted, “A fiction about a septuagenarian black woman is almost completely uncharted territory in British literature.”
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