Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole (b. 1975), who published his critically acclaimed novel Open City in 2011, has often been compared to the German émigré writer W. G. Sebald (1944–2001). One may indeed find certain similarities in these two authors’ prose: both authors employ associative walks of solitary narrator figures as a narrative tool to bind together disparate narrative fragments, and both authors’ works study the lingering effects of histories of violence on a transnational scale. In an essay published in the New Yorker in 2012, Teju Cole also explicitly named Sebald as his “precursor”—“The teacher I never knew, the friend I met only posthumously” (Cole 2012).