The Comfort of Distant Stars

I.O. Echeruo

Canongate, 2026

As a regular achiever of D- in basic maths, the synopsis of this debut novel from Nigerian writer I.O. Echeruo, promising a ‘bold’ blend of ‘physics, philosophy and Igbo cosmology’, almost gave me a panic attack.

False alarm. Yes, this singularly original work is full of observations from its protagonist that momentarily stop you in your tracks: ‘A thing can only be if it affects something else. It is this relationship between the thing that stands and the thing that stands beside it – this is what being is’.

And yes, it has characters writing theses on ‘The Fundamental Equation of Quantum Gravity’, ‘The Hermeneutics of Igbo Christology’, and ‘Assigned Articles: Syntax & Meaning in African Languages’. But really it’s the story of mental disintegration – the fragility of the human mind, what happens when genius intersects with meltdown.

The Comfort of Distant Stars, dedicated to the author’s brother Okechukwu, who died aged 44 in the US, can be seen on a continuum alongside Hannah Green’s 1964 novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which takes the reader inside the mind of a woman with schizophrenia, and Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind, her 1998 account of the mentally ill mathematician John Nash.

‘One cannot understand life without understanding time’, Ezeani Kobidi, the protagonist, tells us as the story begins when he is three years old. Ezeani comes from a high-achieving academic family; his father is a Nigerian Noam Chomsky. Despite their academic respectability and easy affability, the men in his family are terrible people – misogynists and worse. He adores his mother and her comforting scent.

As a child in Nigeria, Ezeani ‘did not grasp in any real way the purpose of school’ – too clever for standard education, he is bullied. A teacher angrily accuses him of plagiarism. He grows up not always understanding social cues and situations. He wears a coat he describes as being made of ‘blue polytetrafluoroethylene’, and veers from eccentric behaviour (refusing to speak other than ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘undetermined’) to later episodes of involuntary detention on a psychiatric ward.

His experience of visionary genius – he calls his insights ‘epiphanies’ – includes actual visions, often frightening and troubling, and the moment when he hears the voice of a dying lizard being casually tortured by his older brother. From early childhood, Ezeani is pursued by Anyanwu, the Igbo Sun God, who appears to him during moments of stress, offering him palm wine and urging him to be ‘stout-hearted’. Anyanwu, however, is far from benevolent.

As an adult, Ezeani explains to an American academic audience, ‘When I was a child I had visions. A spirit often accosted me and spoke to me. The spirit was as real to me as you appear to me now in this room. Perhaps I had a very active imagination, or perhaps an undiagnosed psychiatric illness, or perhaps I did speak to a spirit?’

Ezeani’s brilliance propels him – with the help of his sister Obiageli, his staunchest ally – from Lagos to Cornell University in New York State. There, he is academically feted, although not worldly or grounded enough to smoothly navigate the everyday. He struggles – or rather, his behaviour causes others to struggle – even as he outwardly succeeds. He becomes a professor of physics and marries Heidi, a rich white American who appears genuinely devoted to him, but also devoted to his reputation and legacy.

We, the readers, gain access to the inside of Ezeani’s expansive mind. His lack of modesty is funny (‘I was still convinced of the genius of my insights’), even as the presence of Anyanwu, who leaves Ezeani in peace for years at a time, becomes increasingly dangerous, chaotic, and destructive. Anyanwu, a shape-shifter, appears unannounced in new guises, often bearing alcohol. Ezeani damages his reputation, raging at ‘fascists and Belgians’. Things fall apart.

What might all sound a bit incoherent is held together by the unwavering solidity of Ezeani’s voice as he guides us through the story and the chaos of his own head. The writing is lucid and beautiful: ‘heads of grass drooped, like those of disappointed people’; snow is ‘piles of fluffy, frozen water’; rain ‘a cascade of pale beads’.

Yes, there are tangents into quantum entanglement theory – no, me neither – but from the first page, Ezeani’s story dazzles with originality and sparkle in this multi-layered debut. You could write a thesis on it.

Waterstones: The Comfort of Distant Stars

Suzanne Harrington

Suzanne Harrington is an Irish author and journalist.