Wizard of the Crow (Gikuyu: Mũrogi wa Kagogo) is a 2006 novel written by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and translated from the original Kikuyu into English by the author, his first novel in more than 20 years. The story is set in the imaginary Free Republic of Aburĩria, autocratically governed by one man, known only as the Ruler. The novel received the 2008 Tähtifantasia Award for the best foreign fantasy novel released in Finland in 2007. Reception Wizard of the Crow has been widely and for the most part positively reviewed. Laura Miller in Salon.com wrote: "This is a tale of eternal, essential, human folly, hilarious and endlessly inventive, like a cross between a Pynchon novel and 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' reincarnated on African soil." John Updike in The New Yorker points out that English-language readers "do well to remember that it is a translation from a language whose narrative traditions are mostly oral and heavy on performance; the tale is fantastic and didactic, told in broad strokes of caricature ... seven hundred and sixty-six pages of fiction too aggrieved and grim to be called satire", and ultimately concludes: "The narrative, then, is a journey without a destination, and its characters are improv artists." Jeff Turrentine in The New York Times noted that the novel "blends satire and polemic in its depiction of an African nation at a crossroads in the aftermath of white rule. An allegory presented as a modern-day folk tale (complete with tricksters, magic, disguised lovers and daring escapes), it represents Ngũgĩ's attempt to scrutinize his homeland by borrowing the same postcolonial magnifying glass that writers like Salman Rushdie and Derek Walcott have trained on India and the Caribbean. In his own words, Ngũgĩ has said his wish is 'to sum up Africa of the 20th century in the context of 2,000 years of world history. The Guardian′s reviewer Maya Jaggi writes that "realism is not the chosen weapon in a novel whose absurdist, scatological satire is reminiscent of Alfred Jarry's Ubu plays, or Carlos Fuentes's novelistic skewering of Mexico's Machiavellis in The Eagle's Throne. ... Yet for all its grotesque hyperbole, Wizard of the Crow struck me as truthful in its dissection of power, and remarkably free of bitterness. At more than 700 pages, its flaws, of obsessive reiteration and prolixity, arise partly from its bold experimentation with oral forms, and from giving rein to the pathologies