Teju Cole and Max Liu: Open City

For people like Julius, cities come pre-traumatised...

Teju Cole came to the Bookshop to discuss his first novel, Open City. The book, which follows a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist in New York City five years after 9/11, was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won both the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Internationaler Literaturpreis.

Cole spoke in conversation with writer and journalist Max Liu. Their discussion took in the cities of Lagos, London and New York; W.G. Sebald; Twitter as a literary medium; and the disturbing revelation which closes the novel.