This is an extract from The Comfort of Distant Stars by I.O. Echeruo, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2026. Find out more about the book here, and get your copy here.
One cannot understand life without understanding time. Perhaps that is why the truly insightful child is eager to know which comes first – the chicken or the egg.
When I was barely three years old, I was plucked from my bed, taken to a clearing in a dense, lush forest and made a high chief. The title conferred upon me was the greatest, a title that would take an accomplished, brave, virtuous man a lifetime to obtain.
The rain came down in a cascade of pale beads that broke as they stung my skin and forced me to squint and then close my eyes. I could feel Anyanwu’s rough palms grab my hand, dragging me in the direction of his steps. The red, clayey soil, caught between my toes, made me feel that I would slip. I could barely make out shapes in the half-light of the storm. Everything was green and slicked with rain. The air smelt like burnt iron. I felt tired. But I responded to Anyanwu’s pull.
There were others on the path. They appeared to be following me. I could hear the voices. But their words were drowned by the kernels of rain falling hard on the leaves and the soft echo of that harsh sound off the wet, green foliage. The voices rose and fell, and I imagined that they were arguing among themselves. In one instant, as the voices dropped, I came to believe the argument was over how much money they would get when they sold me and the share each would receive. I was frightened. The thought had come to me clear and complete, in a manner that I would later learn to refer to as an epiphany.
My first instinct was to share this suspicion with Anyanwu. However, I immediately realised that, if they were going to sell me, Anyanwu would surely be in the conspiracy, since he was the one holding my hand and leading the way. While I was still digesting this thought, the voice patterns behind me changed and I heard what sounded like a woman’s voice rising and then falling. I was seized with the idea that the woman was telling the others that I was hungry and needed to be fed. And her concern was sincere, not to fatten me up for sale or slaughter.
Decades later, when I shared the story of this dawn with my wife, she would say the thing she found most remarkable was that at just three years old I had somehow internalised the concept that people could sell others. I reflected on her comment, but I could not understand why anyone would think this the most notable part of the story. This conversation took place in that season when she was taking hormone shots that would enable a technician to harvest eggs from her follicles, a necessary step in the production of the child we were both claiming we wanted. ‘Well, context is important. It’s West Africa after all,’ I responded. ‘For literally two centuries, high commerce consisted of kidnapping your neighbours and selling them off. Some of that must have still been lingering in the air.’ She would smile weakly and look away. Eighteen months after this conversation our only child, Njoku, conceived of a donated egg, would be delivered in a clean, white hospital room in New York City.
*
As if commanded, the rain abruptly stopped and the sun emerged from the clouds, its yellow rays badgering my half-closed eyelids. I opened my eyes. We had come into a clearing in the forest. In the centre stood the trunk of a huge Orji tree, sawed off at about the height of a man’s stomach and scraped and sanded till it was flat. I heard the trailing, arguing party enter the clearing and immediately stop speaking. As if they had had a sudden, collective, epiphany.
The tree trunk was alive. Even though the branches and leaves were gone, the roots reached into the earth and large mushrooms were growing low on its side. I was disturbed by the incongruous juxtaposition – that a thing could be alive when all its critical functions had been cut off. I stared, wondering how the tree reconciled itself to living when it had become a table. I stretched out my hand and touched one of the trunk’s large roots. The people in the clearing started speaking again. Most of them were men and women I recognised. At their centre was my mother. She walked up and knelt to wrap her arms around me. Her perfume and its fragrance of fixed flowers filled my nose and comforted me. ‘How did you know this would be here?’ she asked. And it was then, following her hand, I noticed – sitting on the burnished trunk – white eggs in a clay bowl and a trussed cockerel.
I did not understand my mother’s question, nor did I have a clear sense of where I was or what I was doing. Before I could tell her, seventeen elderly men entered the clearing. I counted each one. Unlike the members of the first party, who were relatives and neighbours, these” “men were completely unknown to me. They wore identical checkered black, red and white cloth tied around their bodies with the loose end draped over one shoulder. Each had a bracelet of red beads wound around one wrist. Their feet were bare, like mine. No one remarked on their appearance. I looked around for Anyanwu. I didn’t see him.
A tall man with a greying beard and a hard, handsome face cleared his throat. ‘Today, we will make him a titled man.’ He raised his hand and pointed at me. ‘There were many who doubted. I will add myself to that count. But now, the child – by himself – has brought us all to this place.’
For the first time he looked at me. He smiled, then looked away as his face hardened. ‘Those that are still asking: “How can we confer the title Ezeani, the highest Ozo title, on a child that has just stopped sucking on his mother’s breasts?” Let Odukwe the Diviner speak. Let no one say they do not know why we, the Nze na Ozo, did this thing.’ He paused, pulled at his checkered cloth and threw it over his right shoulder.
The speaker’s gaze fell on a man with a bad eye – a pale blue disk floating in a white, cloudy fluid – and a large, bushy beard. The man’s clothes were dirty and tattered rags, and a large goatskin bag hung from his shoulders. His good eye darted from side to side as if he was sizing up the gathering. I concluded he was Odukwe, the Diviner.
‘This woman’s child will not sleep at night.’ Odukwe raised his arm and pointed at my mother. ‘She says he wanders through the house muttering strange things. And from birth no month has gone by when he hasn’t fallen so sick that she has feared his death. Many of you here have witnessed it. They have taken him to the doctors that hang things around their necks at the hospital, but no one has been able to tell them what is wrong with the child.’
(c) I.O. Echeruo
Explore the full list of 2026 Orwell Prize finalists, and read further extracts from the books, here.