Back to Books Catalogue
Ejire

Ejire

by Friday Jimoh

The old professor is going home to die. For more than forty years, Professor Omokehinde Odusote has built a life thousands of miles away from home. A celebrated academic in America, he seemed to have done it. He collected honours, published books, survived broken marriages, and raised children now spread across Europe and the Americas. At seventy, he returns to Nigeria. To his friends abroad, the journey feels like an unspoken farewell. But in the heart of Yorubaland, the retired professor finds the embers of a life that has been waiting for him still burning. There, his identical twin brother, Chief Taiyelolu Salako Odusote, presides over a sprawling and tightly knit household of wives, children, grandchildren, and generations bound together by obligation, rivalries, and inherited loyalties. While Kehinde built a name abroad, Taiyelolu built a dynasty at home. Then a stranger arrives at the family compound with a claim that threatens everything Kehinde believes about himself. The man says he is Omokehinde’s son. A son who grew up without him. Forced to confront foreign challenges of his new life at home, Omokehinde must now reckon with the true cost of migration, and what professional success truly means. As he comes face to face with the life he left behind , he finds himself measuring the result of his choices in the face of the alternate life of a twin brother who vividly represents the road not taken. Sweeping, intimate, and deeply moving, Ejire is a novel about two brothers, two lives, and one haunting question: what might have awaited him at the end of the road he never chose?

About the Book

The old professor is going home to die. For more than forty years, Professor Omokehinde Odusote has built a life thousands of miles away from home. A celebrated academic in America, he seemed to have done it. He collected honours, published books, survived broken marriages, and raised children now spread across Europe and the Americas. At seventy, he returns to Nigeria. To his friends abroad, the journey feels like an unspoken farewell. But in the heart of Yorubaland, the retired professor finds the embers of a life that has been waiting for him still burning. There, his identical twin brother, Chief Taiyelolu Salako Odusote, presides over a sprawling and tightly knit household of wives, children, grandchildren, and generations bound together by obligation, rivalries, and inherited loyalties. While Kehinde built a name abroad, Taiyelolu built a dynasty at home. Then a stranger arrives at the family compound with a claim that threatens everything Kehinde believes about himself. The man says he is Omokehinde’s son. A son who grew up without him. Forced to confront foreign challenges of his new life at home, Omokehinde must now reckon with the true cost of migration, and what professional success truly means. As he comes face to face with the life he left behind , he finds himself measuring the result of his choices in the face of the alternate life of a twin brother who vividly represents the road not taken. Sweeping, intimate, and deeply moving, Ejire is a novel about two brothers, two lives, and one haunting question: what might have awaited him at the end of the road he never chose?