A Season of Light is an intergenerational novel about a Nigerian family in small town Florida that delves into questions around generational trauma, the inheritance of war, mental health and the complexities of marriage. It starts with Fidelis Ewerike, a former soldier in the Biafran war and the patriarch of the Ewerike family being deeply affected by the kidnapping of the 276 Nigerian schoolgirls in 2014. His behavior turns increasingly erratic resulting in him forcing his daughter, Amara, who reminds him of his disappeared sister Ugochi, to remain locked in her bedroom out of concerns for her safety.
While the novel is set in Florida, there is a Chicago connection. Julie Iromuanya is an assistant professor for the Program in Creative Writing and affiliate faculty of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. For readers local to Chicago, don’t miss the book’s launch event at Call & Response Books this evening!
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ariana Valderrama
A Season of Light is set in rural Florida and there are some beautiful and vivid descriptions of nature. Can you talk about your relationship with nature and how that may or may not have influenced your characters?
Julie Iromuanya
I studied under the novelist Jonis Agee at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and she was always emphasizing the importance of setting, not just as a backdrop, but as character. I’ve also begun to think of setting as crucial to defining the parameters for conflict. Where you are and when you’re there define what’s possible. Time and place also define what constitutes a crime or a breach of the said and unsaid laws which guide and govern interpersonal relations. To me, this is where story lives. The Ewerikes, based in the fictional almost-town Econlockhatchee, are living in a place that catalyzes their sense of dispossession and displacement. There’s always the ever-looming hint of catastrophe with the fires in the periphery of the story and a sense of gathering heat in an area surrounded by brush.
Ariana Valderrama
Both your debut, Mr. and Mrs. Doctor and A Season of Light center on Nigerian immigrants living in rural communities. What draws you to explore these particular areas in your work?
Julie Iromuanya
What I find fascinating about the more remote or rural locale is how it affects the sense of scale. In these impressive, wide-open spaces, we feel claustrophobic. Problems, no matter how small, loom larger. Differences are deformities and to be private is to be discreet. In both Mr. and Mrs. Doctor and A Season of Light the characters’ foreignness and alienness become magnified in these spaces forcing characters who would not likely cross paths to inhabit the same space.
Ariana Valderrama
Fidelis, the father at the center of the novel, is a former soldier in the Biafra war. After reading your book for those who want to know, including me, are there books you recommend that come to mind?
Julie Iromuanya
There is an enormous body of literary work on the Nigeria-Biafra war, so much so that while doing research I developed a course on the authorship of war. As I was developing the course, I became interested in the distinction between the lived experience and what constitutes authorship—what kinds of authorial choices facilitate a particular experience for the reader—so while familiar titles like Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, appear on the list, so do older texts like Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, written entirely in Pidgin English, and newer ones like LaGuardia, Nnedi Okorafor’s futuristic graphic novel and Chinelo Okparanta’s queer romance Under the Udala Trees. Elechi Amadi’s memoir Sunset in Biafra provides a nuanced perspective that considers ethnic minorities within Biafra. Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country and Girls at War and much of the essays and poetry of Wole Soyinka also appear on the list. And we also spend some time with the poetry of Christopher Okigbo, who died in combat. A surprising essay I also came across was Kurt Vonnegut’s “Biafra: A People Betrayed,” which provided a perspective from beyond Nigeria.
Ariana Valderrama
Fascinating about the Vonnegut! Which leads me to wonder, what was the most random or fascinating tidbit you found in doing research for A Season of Light?
Julie Iromuanya
I had heard of the Biafra Airlift program before I began writing this book, but I didn’t know a lot about it. When the embargo was placed on Biafra, starvation essentially became a weapon of war. Children were some of the first victims. Life magazine’s publication enshrined the war as one of the first major humanitarian crises, and suddenly around the world church missions and relief agencies were mobilized to deliver food and medical supplies to the region. What I didn’t know was that when aid was flown in, sick, starving children were flown out. Many of those children were never returned home. To lose, bury, and grieve a child is one thing, but to never know what happened is a kind of wound that can never fully heal. This feeling of loss that has no sense of completeness seems to explain how many Igbos feel about Biafra, so it became an important part of the story I wanted to tell about the Ewerike family.
Ariana Valderrama
In reading the novel I realized I haven’t read many books about the children of Prisoners of War, (that may say more about the kind of books I’m typically drawn to) but what drew you to this particular heartbreaking storyline? Were there specific questions you had about war and trauma that you wanted to use these characters to explore?
Julie Iromuanya
I was drawn to this story through a conversation I had with a friend. For several years, I spent my summers teaching in Hong Kong where the buildings are built on cliffs, so the elevators keep going up. A group of us were in the elevator having our usual casual morning chatter and at some point the group segmented into smaller groups, and I’m not sure how we came to the topic but we both ended up disclosing that our fathers were veterans of wars—his in Vietnam, mine in Nigeria—and from there we found commonalities in their reticence to speak about their time during the war. It wasn’t a throwaway conversation for me. It stayed. I knew I wanted to do something with the notion of young people joined by the inheritance of war.
Ariana Valderrama
One of my favorite questions to ask is about writerly influences and given your background as a professor in a creative writing program I’m particularly curious about authors you admire and any whose work specifically influenced A Season of Light?
Julie Iromuanya
This is always such a tough question for me because there are so many writers I admire, so I’ll limit myself to just one title. Family Life, by Akhil Sharma, came late in my process of writing A Season of Light, nonetheless, it was a book that I couldn’t put down. Family Life is about an immigrant family whose entire trajectory shifts after an accident. It’s such a precisely written book in terms of technique. Sharma writes with patience, allowing the story to carefully unfurl with such humor and tenderness in an otherwise melancholic book about devastating loss. The book is not about death, but rather decay, the prolonged process of death, and I think there’s something very precious and frankly macabre about telling a story in that space. A Season of Light begins in that space, but it doesn’t stay there.
Ariana Valderrama
Your cover is very striking and reminded me of one key scene in the book. Without spoilers are you able to talk about any images that inspired you or what you wanted the cover to convey?
Julie Iromuanya
I think I know which scene you’re thinking of! However, although I love the cover art, I can’t take credit for it. My editor, Kathy Pories, introduced me to the work of artist Jon Key. What I love is that the cover bears the characteristic elements of his style, like the graphic geometric design and bold colors within a controlled palette of only purple, green, red, and black. Because of the juxtaposition of hard lines and soft curving lines weaving the four distinct arms together—without the hands ever meeting—the image simultaneously depicts togetherness and separateness, which is such a central aspect of the story.
Ariana Valderrama
Both of your novels probe the institution of marriage. I’m newly married but I thought you beautifully portrayed the complexities of marriage at various stages of life. I was alternatively both confused and delighted by Fidelis and Adaobi’s marriage depending on what chapter I was reading. What is it about marriage that intrigues you or what draws you to using marriage as a tool to explore other questions?
Julie Iromuanya
Congratulations! I’m drawn to the family as an institution with its own unique operating structure, laws, mores, values, and responsibilities, and so marriage is a corollary to that. In my two novels, the families of Job and Ifi, the protagonists of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, bring them together in an arranged marriage. But in A Season of Light, Fidelis and Adaobi’s families attempt to tear them apart. A secondary cleavage is the war which is still there even after the extended families aren’t. Both marriages require their participants to define their own version of love, and so in a way, the plot is really about these couples defining their own version of love—and it may not hold up to anyone else’s notion of love—but it’s theirs and it takes the whole book for them to get there.
Ariana Valderrama
The summary is what initially drew me to your book and then the blurb from beloved Chicago literary citizen Rebecca Makkai confirmed I needed to pick this up immediately. How do you find the Chicago literary scene and its impact on your writing?
Julie Iromuanya
That’s wonderful to hear! Rebecca’s a real dynamo in the Chicago literary scene and she’s super busy, so it means a lot that she took the time to blurb my book. I’m not in the literary scene nearly as much as I should be—I’m more of a homebody—but I do love to travel, and so ironically, I’ve met most of the Chicago writers I know through my travels to writers’ workshops, conferences, retreats, and teaching gigs. It truly feels like a small world, but I’m happy to call Chicago my home. I love the energy of the city; it feels alive in a way that doesn’t require explanation, but at the same time, I love the elegance of anonymity in a crowd. And one of the treats about being so central geographically is there’s always a friend passing through town, giving a reading, showing art at an exhibit, giving a lecture, so there’s always a chance to renew ties, stay connected, stay inspired.
Fiction
A Season of Light
By Julie Iromuanya
Algonquin Books
Published February 4, 2025
