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Sirocco Express
Tony Judge

Sirocco Express

By
Tony Judge

Fiction

Voters Rating 1000 / Published

1000

Synopsis

Sirocco Express is a powerful novel of journey, discovery and how to be human in an increasingly inhuman world. Adebayo, a young Nigerian, leaves his home in Lagos and embarks on an extraordinarily difficult journey to try to discover a better life in Europe.

Abebayo soon finds himself in a shockingly unfamiliar and dangerous world, peopled by human traffickers, smugglers and desperado companions. The only way to survive is to use his native wit and trust his instincts.

In Sirocco Express, readers accompany Adebayo on a journey risking great danger and death, as he discovers how truly brutal the people-smuggling business really is.

Adebayo's journey continues when he reaches his geographical destination. His life in London is full of ups and downs and dangerous secrets, all brought to a sharply twisted, satisfying conclusion.

“William Faulkner and poet Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost had a true craft for writing descriptive, yet simple, images that stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.  Judge indeed has that craft.” – Lulu Book Review

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Extract

He woke and looked around his room for damage. It was intact and otherwise unoccupied. The music of the city still ebbed and flowed through the open window. When he attempted to get up his head swam. He sank down and drifted away again.


Now he heard a censorious voice, his own, but coming from a distant, detached perspective:


‘When are you going to cast off this yoke…do something… something of your own volition? Will there always be someone sitting on your shoulder watching: some Russian aristocrat, born into a world of privilege that you can barely imagine; or some Pole, who chronicled an era that vanished in a puff of smoke soon after he did; or some Englishman, who thought that he had explored the furthest depths of poverty and deprivation, but died a hundred years too soon to see Lagos; or the son of the Gulag, who fled into the arms of his country’s greatest enemy? When will you understand that you are invisible; that no one has the slightest interest in what you think, or feel, or do? You are as a grain of dust on the hide of an elephant.’


The next morning, when he emerged from his room, he felt as if he were stepping onto the surface of an alien planet. Like a snake that sloughs off its skin and emerges renewed, he had already discarded the ingrained habits of his previous unsatisfactory life; the life prior to his day of revelations. All that remained now was to establish the modalities of his new life: that which beckoned from beyond the narrow boundaries of family, college, church and his cherished books.

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