Castro’s Ghost is set between the 1990s to present in southwestern Nigeria. It is the story of Kehinde, a widow in her 30s, who killed her abusive husband and had gone into self-imposed solitary living for 3 years. This is the story of her resurfacing into old and new social ties, her quest for love and redemption, and the return of an unexpected face from her past.
The target audience for the novel is adults who have a taste for literary fiction with undercurrents of magical realism, campus novels, and themes of intimacy, political unrest, memory, and redemption.
CONTEXT:
The value of this book rests in its attention to redemption after trauma and loss through the phantasmagoric world seen in Castro’s ghost. While the book account for campus activism, the psychic connection between twins, and love amidst social inequality respectively, this novel’s story of a ghost seeking redemption offers the unique perspective that the dead or condemned, if given a chance, may exonerate themselves.
Following Castro’s charismatic personality in his early Campus days and his descent into violence as triggered by structural injustice after prison, the reader encounters a progressive character arc that seems complete and obvious, yet one which is further complicated by the return of his contrite ghost.
In a world that is so versed in polarizing good and evil, positive and negative, just and unjust, Castro’s many lives offer a fresh take on what it means to live in the instability of contradictions and that these contradictions, as Bertolt Brecht puts it “are our only hope”.
Diekara Oloruntoba-Oju