Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is Wole Soyinka's first novel in nearly five decades, a satirical political thriller set in a lightly fictionalized version of contemporary Nigeria. Its title is drawn from a real survey that once ranked Nigerians as the happiest people on earth, a claim Soyinka uses as a springboard for scathing social commentary.

Surgeon Dr. Kighare Menka discovers evidence of a black market in human body parts operating through his own hospital, tied to a secretive network of politically and religiously connected figures who traffic in body parts for ritual use. His old friend Duyole Pitan-Payne is meanwhile preparing to take up a senior post at the United Nations in New York — but unseen forces are working to make sure he never arrives.

Told with dense, allusive prose and structured as part whodunit, part allegory, the novel indicts corruption, religious hypocrisy, and the machinery of power in postcolonial Nigeria, while never losing its satirical, often mordantly funny voice.