Hangman
An unnamed middle-aged man wakes in his New York apartment to find his suitcase already packed and a one-way ticket waiting on the table. He flies back to the unnamed Sub-Saharan African country he left decades earlier, ostensibly to visit his dying brother, and the novel follows him through cab rides, hotel rooms, family compounds, and bureaucratic encounters that all carry the same dreamlike, deadpan, vaguely menacing quality. Binyam writes the book in a flat first-person voice that turns every rule, custom, and family expectation into a small absurdist trap.
What you might want to know about Hangman
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
An unnamed exile is summoned home to Sub-Saharan Africa to visit a dying brother in this deadpan absurdist debut from 2023.
Hangman was written by Maya Binyam and published in 2023. It is her debut novel, a literary novel about a man traveling from the United States back to a country in East Africa.
Hangman was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and won the 2024 Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was widely featured on best-of-2023 lists.
Hangman is a standalone novel by Maya Binyam, not part of a series.
Hangman is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.