These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

Summary

A book of letters from Bayo Akomolafe, a Nigerian-born writer who trained as a clinical psychologist, to his young daughter Alethea. By his publisher’s account he approaches large questions through fatherhood, and the letters range over modernity’s myths and rituals, food, justice and climate change. Part memoir, part decolonial philosophy, it asks what home might mean in unsettled times.

Rationale

Letters to a daughter are enculturation written down: a parent weighing what of his culture to hand on. Parents, we note, help shape the contexts where dispositions take hold.