BOOKS
Author Interview Femi Fadugba
Femi Fadugba’s time-travelling début has already been picked up by Netflix, which is adapting his book into a film starring recent Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya
Fiona Noble @fionanoblebooks ‘‘A
ll my mates thought I was a total weirdo: (A) because I was reading and (B) because I was reading about relativit and time travel.” So says
Femi Fadugba of his 12-year-old self, as he talks to me on a video call from Peckham, south London. His Young Adult début is the ambitious and highly addictive sci-fi thriller The Upper World; it will be published this August by Penguin, which scored the deal in a heated 15-way auction. A Netflix film will follow, produced by and starring recent Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya. I’m curious to know how an Oxford-educated physicist has become one of the hotest names in the book world. The Upper World follows a two storyline plot,
intertwining time-travel physics into a high-stakes, life or death thriller. In 2020, Esso is a teenage boy experiencing a swiſtly escalating vortex of trouble over the course of a single day, from the ordinary—impressing a girl, trying to do OK at school—to becoming caught up in a violent feud, just by being associated with certain people. In many ways, explains Fadugba, “Esso is all the things that every kid has a right to be, but he just gets put in a situation where he very quickly has to grow up.” When he is hit by a car, Esso finds he can access a mysterious world and see glimpses of the past and future. In the high-surveillance London of 2035, Rhia is a girl in foster care. If Esso’s big
18 7th May 2021
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