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“... In the first paragraph​ of Teju Cole’s new novel, Tremor, a man takes a photo of a hedge. ‘The leaves are glossy and dark and from the dying blooms rises a fragrance that might be jasmine.’ Probably not jasmine, since the main character, a photography professor called Tunde, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but frost zones are not the point ...”

“... It’s​ not entirely clear which of Teju Cole’s books, Open City or Every Day Is for the Thief, has seniority. Open City made a strong impression when it appeared in 2011, and now Every Day Is for the Thief has arrived in consolidation, though it first appeared in Nigeria in 2007. Neither book offers much of the structure or imaginative texture of fiction, with Open City resembling a beautifully composed and extended blog, while Every Day Is for the Thief starts off journalistically, as if its subject (as the title suggests) is going to be Nigerian corruption, as experienced by an American resident visiting his native country after a long absence ...”

“... complex, amorphous and widespread. N+1 inaudibly conceded as much when it praised Open City, by Teju Cole, a Nigerian writer based in New York City, whose first novel is narrated by a young half-Nigerian, half-German psychiatry intern, and which mixes elements of familiar postcoloniality with W.G. Sebald’s flaneurial émigré sensibility.But to Open ...”