Shelter in a Hostile World, second installment in Mack Little’s Love and Peace series, is an epic tale of resistance, desire, and tragedy, saturating readers in the complexity of Igbo culture.
Little paints a character-rich portrait of the horrors of enslavement and the unthinkable violence against women in the Caribbean, locking people together in relationships molded by adversity.
Set in 17th century Igboland—the invaded region of Nigeria — and on the island of Barbados, Shelter in a Hostile World is a searingly brief novel packed with mesmerizing prose. It blends genres to create a literary language entirely its own.
Throughout Little’s story, readers follow the life and loves of Badu Obosi, a haunted revolutionary escaping enslavement to protect his daughter from sexual violence.
As he seeks shelter from the hostility of his exterior and inner worlds, he is submerged in memories of his early years as a passionate young man deeply in love with an unattainable girl named Ekemma. Although separated from him by class status in their Igbo community, Badu’s adoration for Ekemma is overwhelming and alters the course of his life.
Badu eventually finds a mature love with his current wife—an equally traumatized yet empowered Irish woman named Saoirse. She forces Badu to come to terms with his ghosts, regrets, and desires so he can release himself of his emotional wounds and forge a new life as a marriage partner and a free man in control of his own destiny.
Throughout it all, the paranormal manifestations of his past—known in Igbo culture as “Duppy”—threaten to undo him. In the end, Badu must let himself be rescued not only from his physical threats, but from the mental and emotional terrors that have kept him from living fully embodied.
Shelter in a Hostile World weaves in and out of time, place, and perspective, allowing us to see how Badu has been shaped by his experiences.
Throughout this short novel, Little masterfully entangles genre and theme — including coming of age, horror, romance, and action — creating an expansive collage that can touch a vast audience.
Little’s writing is not for the faint-hearted. Shelter in a Hostile World is a complicated, difficult story that invites readers to deconstruct plot, themes, and motives and find their way to the truth. Cultural expectations and traditions are troubled by the human experience. Fleshed out in vivid detail, these characters resist the constraints of easy interpretations.
Women experience a variety of sexual traumas, innocent people are the victims of slaveholders’ extreme brutality, and the ghosts of the wronged come back to reconcile with their wrongdoers, often in grotesque ways.
Even so, the novel forges a bridge between the inescapable past and the grueling present, allowing characters and readers alike to pass into a world where peace and hope can be found even amidst the most horrific of circumstances.
In the end, Badu realizes that all the regrets and desires “that pulled him in opposing directions receded until the whole of his thought and purpose crystallized into a ‘shelter in a hostile world.’” Similarly, this novel pulls together threads that appear to be leading in different directions and knits them into something whole and entirely its own.
Infused with sensory language and descriptions of setting, Shelter in a Hostile World pierces readers’ hearts and demands the dignity of their attention.
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