Bridgett M. Davis

PLAYLIST:

Into the Go-Slow

Paperback Edition
ISBN: 978-1-55861-864-0
Publication Date: 09-09-2014

In 1987 Detroit, twenty-one-year-old Angie passes time working in a mall and watching sitcoms with her mom. But beneath the surface, she is consumed by thoughts of her sister’s death years earlier in Nigeria. Ella had introduced Angie to Black Power and a vision of returning to Africa. On impulse, Angie travels to Lagos and begins to retrace Ella’s steps. Against a backdrop of the city’s infamous go-slow—traffic as wild and unpredictable as a Fela lyric—she uncovers some harsh truths. For anyone who has wished to be of a different era, this book captures the pain of living vicariously and the exhilaration of finding yourself.
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PRESS
“Davis (Shifting Through Neutral, 2005) explores the ambivalent, often troubling experiences of African-Americans in Africa through the lens of a young woman who, having grown up during the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, struggles to find her place in the world during the less idealistic ’80s…..The difficult intellectual questions Davis raises about personal identity and an African-American’s relation to contemporary Africa are particularly resonant given Nigeria’s current woes.”
Kirkus Reviews  July 31, 2014

PRAISE FOR INTO THE GO-SLOW

“At its core, Into the Go-Slow is a love story — romantic love, love of family, love of culture, love of self. Angie is an unforgettable heroine who will steal your heart and break it, too. Bridgett M. Davis is a brilliant writer.”                                                 –Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage and Silver Sparrow

“Bridgett M. Davis has created a beautiful allegory at the heart of a realist novel –an allegory of love, family, expansion, hope, and transformation — all of it worked out compassionately and with integrity in the only country that offers both allegory and realism–Nigeria. A strong book.”                                                                   —Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas

“Davis’s novel asks the big questions reverberating through the African American community in the wake of the 1980s: Who are we now? What is Africa to us? Homeland or fantasy? Into the Go-Slow is a page turner; its daring protagonist is a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, searching for the legacy of the sister she has lost to an era of change.”                                                                                        —Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

“Into the Go-Slow spans continents and years, and traces the lives of sisters linked by loss and discovery. Bridgett M. Davis vividly renders the troubled, idealistic 1970s and the what’s-left-to-dream-about 1980s, offering a powerful narrative driven by the all-too-human bafflement about how to resolve what could have been with what is.”
—Farai Chideya, host of One with Farai on Public Radio International

“Into the Go-Slow is an exquisitely executed journey enriched by the depth and complexity of the characters, the detailed specificity of the varied communities of Nigeria, and, above all, the poignant rendering of the yearning heart of the one who was left behind. Just beautiful.”
—Wilhelmina Jenkins, moderator for Literary Fiction by People of Color, Goodreads