--- title: The Palm-Wine Drinkard: 100 Best Fantasy Books description: Find out why The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola is on TIME's list of the best fantasy books of all time canonical: https://time.com/collections/100-best-fantasy-books/5898433/the-palm-wine-drinkard/ article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2020-10-14T20:57:41.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-02T23:43:16.324Z og:title: 'The Palm-Wine Drinkard' Is on TIME's List of the 100 Best Fantasy Books og:description: Here’s why it made the list og:url: https://time.com/collections/100-best-fantasy-books/5898433/the-palm-wine-drinkard/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltaa78628672abf3a9/698a132416d884b71dc38b10/The-Palm-Wine-Drinkard-Amos-Tutuola-100-best-fantasy-books.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 'The Palm-Wine Drinkard' Is on TIME's List of the 100 Best Fantasy Books og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 'The Palm-Wine Drinkard' Is on TIME's List of the 100 Best Fantasy Books twitter:description: Here’s why it made the list twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltaa78628672abf3a9/698a132416d884b71dc38b10/The-Palm-Wine-Drinkard-Amos-Tutuola-100-best-fantasy-books.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Oct 14, 2020 # The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) ## TIME Staff  In 1950, Amos Tutuola, a 30-year-old Nigerian, read a magazine and decided he could write too. He drafted what would become _The Palm-Wine Drinkard_, and sent it as a response to a “manuscripts wanted” ad put out by Lutheran World Press, a Christian publisher. A year later, Faber & Faber, one of the preeminent publishers of English literature, sent him a letter inquiring about publishing it. Soon after, it appeared in print across the U.K. and the U.S. At the time, it was unlike anything English-language readers had ever seen; even today, it’s bracingly original in its voice and ideas. The story’s protagonist and narrator is an alcoholic with God-like thirst and resilience: He drinks 225 kegs of palm wine a day, and that is all he does. The inciting incident of the novel is that his “tapster” dies, and there is no longer anyone to get him all the palm wine he desires. So, the narrator sets off to seek the Deads’ Town, where he believes he can find his tapster, now in his post-life form, and bring him back to his village so he can return to his life of drinking transcendent amounts of booze. Along the way is a sort of picaresque of the grotesque, where the narrator encounters monsters, (mostly malicious) magical beings and all sorts of incarnations of death and destruction. Tutuola, writing at a moment when the Yoruba culture he was born into was colliding with that of British Colonialism and Christian proselytism, weaves in aspects of the new West African modernity with Yoruba myth and oral storytelling so seamlessly you could blink and miss it. And the language, too, feels unique to the moment: Tutuola uses the Colonial British he learned in Anglican school to create a more propulsive and energetic version of English to tell the stories of Western Africa. —_Elijah Wolfson_ **Buy Now:** _The Palm-Wine Drinkard_ on [Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/a/4973/9780802133632) |[ Amazon](https://amzn.to/2GPIopF) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/100-best-fantasy-books/5898433/the-palm-wine-drinkard/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/100-best-fantasy-books/5898433/the-palm-wine-drinkard/"},"headline":"'The Palm-Wine Drinkard' Is on TIME's List of the 100 Best Fantasy Books","datePublished":"2020-10-14T20:57:41.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-02T23:43:16.324Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/100-best-fantasy-books/5898433/the-palm-wine-drinkard/","keywords":["Books","list"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltaa78628672abf3a9/698a132416d884b71dc38b10/The-Palm-Wine-Drinkard-Amos-Tutuola-100-best-fantasy-books.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"creator":"TIME Staff","articleSection":"","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltaa78628672abf3a9/698a132416d884b71dc38b10/The-Palm-Wine-Drinkard-Amos-Tutuola-100-best-fantasy-books.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/100-best-fantasy-books/5898433/the-palm-wine-drinkard/","name":"'The Palm-Wine Drinkard' Is on TIME's List of the 100 Best Fantasy Books"}}]}] ```