A complex and interesting book. So many characters and so many story lines! I've just read the (good) Dutch translation, but think I need to read it again to understand it better. This time in the English original...
So, a few days later, and now I've read the English version. Indeed, there are a lot of small but important details which I missed on the first reading and also the bewildering array of multiple interacting characters makes much more sense (to me at least) once I've already got a bit of an idea what is going on.
The eccentric (/original) punctuation was less of a problem than I expected. Mostly, conventional sentence breaks are replaced with a new line followed by a space. I was soon reading that without noticing. That did make it a bit pointless. What worked quite well was that sometimes sentences were broken up that way mid-sentence, which gave a sort of poetic effect. The same construction is used for (bulletless) lists and tables, and that also works well.
The book is centred around the experience and identity of black British people. The extraordinary diversity of richness of their history is very well brought over. One aspect that the English original does much better than the Dutch translation is the dialect and rhythm of the speech of some of the characters. Often written dialect is just irritating (imho), but in this case, I could just hear the African and Caribbean voices, and it definitely added an extra dimension.
A sentence which I thought summed up the book nicely was, "you must go back [to Oxford] and fight the battles that are your British birthright, as a true Nigerian".