Award-winning Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma’s first novel The Fishermen was a finalist for the Booker prize, and his second, An Orchestra of Minorities, was also shortlisted. His latest book The Road to the Country intertwines myth and realism and is destined to stand alongside Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun as the defining novel of one of the most devastating civil wars of the 20th century. Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, it’s the epic story of a shy, bookish student haunted by long-held guilt and shame who must go to war to free himself. When Kunle’s younger brother disappears as his country explodes in civil war, Kunle sets out on an impossible rescue mission and a journey of atonement. Obioma talks to the TLS Fiction and Politics Editor.