# Open City

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/teju-cole/open-city/9780571279432

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![Open City](https://quivercdn.com/covers/faber-and-faber/teju-cole/open-city_978-05-7127-943-2-ceb30316.webp?v=2026-11-08%2004%3A14%3A36)

- Book: [Open City](https://www.bookquiver.com/teju-cole/open-city) ([Open City.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/teju-cole/open-city.md))
- Authors: [Teju Cole](https://www.bookquiver.com/teju-cole)
- Publisher: Faber AND Faber
- ISBN: 978-05-7127-943-2
- Pages: 259
- Published: 2012-02-02
- Language: en_US
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

The bestselling debut novel from a writer heralded as the twenty-first-century W. G. Sebald. A haunting novel about national identity, race, liberty, loss and surrender, Open City follows a young Nigerian doctor as he wanders aimlessly along the streets of Manhattan. For Julius the walks are a release from the tight regulations of work, from the emotional fallout of a failed relationship, from lives past and present on either side of the Atlantic. Isolated amid crowds of bustling strangers, Julius criss-crosses not just physical landscapes but social boundaries too, encountering people whose otherness sheds light on his own remarkable journey from Nigeria to New York - as well as into the most unrecognisable facets of his own soul.