“I don’t think there is any way of discussing Teju Cole’s aesthetic without putting front and center this idea of his relentless inventiveness,” the writer Amitava Kumar wrote by email. Cole calls his new novel “a reiteration of my faith in fiction.” But it didn’t come easily or quickly. After “Open City,” Cole began to conceive of a big work of nonfiction on Lagos, his hometown, in the vein of Suketu Mehta’s book “Maximum City,” about Mumbai. (Cole, who often borrows from his own biography in his books, was born in Kalamazoo, Mich. and raised in Nigeria. I think I had to realize that what I have to offer is something else, closer to the bone and more personal.”

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Persons: Amitava Kumar, “, Thelonious Monk, Kumar, Cole, ”, ” Cole, that’s Locations: Lagos, ”, Mumbai, Kalamazoo, Mich, Nigeria, United States