In Exodus, Tolu Daniel’s essays are pulled between what roots him and his travels. Alien, flaneur, migrant, exile, and pilgrim, these essays wander and wonder as Daniel helps us know a place through both his incisive mind and restless feet. Through delis, city streets, parks, bookstores, museums and nightclubs we are asked to think about the hopes that draw us to places and the losses that rewrite our origin stories. Profound and beautifully crafted, Daniel’s writing draws us into the quest with no destination–a life forever lived between homes.
 

Traci Brimhall, author of The Grief Artist

Tolu Daniel has chronicled the pathway of a generation that began with the hopes of democracy and now inhabits the vast dispersal of migration, where its members are forced to reckon with the world around them, a world for which he has found a language.

 

Romeo Oriogun, author of The Gathering of Bastards

What thorny delight to travel the diaspora—from Abeokuta to Accra to St. Louis to London to Manhattan, Kansas, and more—with a thinker like Tolu Daniel. Part portrait of an artist, part call to action, this collection charts an urgent course through questions of migration, belonging, state violence, memory, friendship, ambition, art, loss, and love. In a voice wry and knowing, attentive and alive, Exodus performs the difficulty, grace, and wonder of finding a place between—in Daniel’s words—“what you know to be true and what the world insists on believing.”

 

Edward McPherson, author of Look Out and The History of the Future