In The End, It Was All About Love
Musa Okwonga
The narrator arrives in Berlin, a place famed for its hedonism, to find peace and maybe love; only to discover that the problems which have long haunted him have arrived there too, and are more present than ever. As he approaches his fortieth birthday, nearing the age where his father was killed in a brutal revolution, he drifts through this endlessly addictive and sometimes mystical city, through its slow days and bottomless nights, wondering whether he will ever escape the damage left by his father’s death. With the world as a whole more uncertain, as both the far-right and global temperatures rise at frightening speed, he finds himself fighting a fierce inner battle against his turbulent past, for a future free of his fear of failure, of persecution, and of intimacy. In The End, It Was All About Love is a journey of loss and self-acceptance that takes its nameless narrator all the way through bustling Berlin to his roots, a quiet village on the Uganda-Sudan border. It is a bracingly honest story of love, sexuality and spirituality, of racism, dating, and alienation; of fleeing the greatest possible pain, and of the hopeful road home.
Media Reviews
Mesmerising and deeply moving. Wise, generous and devastatingly precise. – Elif Shafak
Okwonga shows how Brexit-era prejudice can seep into the skin … an uncynical, affirmative enterprise … [of] heart-swelling intimacy – Observer
This book sings. It wails and howls and it whispers. It curls you up and opens you out. It holds you close and asks you why? It left me full of energy and flames and more inspired than I have felt for a very long time. – Steven Camden aka Polarbear