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And in The Virgin of Flames, the Nigerian-born novelist - who's also a poet with a new collection, Hands Washing Water - sets another story of a protagonist coming to grips with his own identity in a multicultural milieu.

The setting is Los Angeles, and his hero is Black, a cross-dressing native Angeleno mural artist of Salvadoran and Nigerian parentage who's haunted by visions of the Virgins of Fatima and Guadalupe, fixated on a transsexual Mexican stripper named Sweet Girl, and often visited in the City of Angels by the archangel Gabriel, who's given to masquerading as a pigeon.