The Devil that Danced on the Water

The Devil that Danced on the Water PDF Author: Aminatta Forna
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0006531261
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 11

Book Description
Aminatta Forna's intensely personal history is a passionate and vivid account of an idyllic childhood that became the stuff of nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of post-colonial Africa, danger, flight, the bitterness of exile in Britain, and the terrible consequences of her dissident father's stand against tyranny." -- cover

The Devil That Danced on the Water

The Devil That Danced on the Water PDF Author: Aminatta Forna
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802191959
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Book Description
“[An] elegantly written mix of complex history, riveting memoir and damning exposé,” from this award-winning Sierra Leonean author (Publishers Weekly). As a child, Aminatta Forna was witness to the political upheaval and social unrest of post-colonial Africa. Forced to flee her home for exile in Britain, she was subject to the consequences of her dissident father’s actions. After war had abated in Sierra Leone, Aminatta’s father, Mohamed, returned to his country to be part of the fledgling democracy. But as progress gave way to dictatorships and corruption, Mohamed soon found himself caught in a dangerous political battle, imprisoned for his beliefs and facing far worse. Years later, Aminatta returns to her home country as an adult and a journalist. Searching for the truth of her father’s fate and her country’s destiny, she uncovers a harrowing web of intrigue, conspiracy, and painful revelations. The Devil That Danced on the Water is an “extremely moving” memoir of family, heritage, and innocence lost (The Guardian).

Ancestor Stones

Ancestor Stones PDF Author: Aminatta Forna
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802191967
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
From the award-winning author: A “wonderfully ambitious” novel of West Africa, told through the struggles and dreams of four extraordinary women (The Guardian). When a cousin offers Abie her family’s plantation in the West African village of Rofathane in Sierra Leone, she leaves her husband, children, and career in London to reclaim the home she left behind long ago. With the help of her four aunts—Asana, Mariama, Hawa, and Serah—Abie begins a journey to uncover the past of her family and her home country, buried among the neglected coffee plants. From rivalries between local chiefs and religious leaders to arranged marriages, manipulative unions, traditional desires, and modern advancements, Abie’s aunts weave a tale of a nation’s descent into chaos—and their own individual struggles to claim their destiny. Hailed by Marie Claire as “a fascinating evocation of the experience of African women, and all that has been gained—and lost—with the passing of old traditions,” Ancestor Stones is a powerful exploration of family, culture, heritage, and hope. “This is [Forna’s] first novel, but it is too sophisticated to read like one.” —The Guardian

Happiness

Happiness PDF Author: Aminatta Forna
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 0802165575
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
The prize-winning author of The Memory of Love investigates London’s hidden nature and marginalized communities in this fascinating novel. London, 2014. A fox makes its way across Waterloo Bridge. The distraction causes two pedestrians to collide—Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist. Attila has arrived in London with two tasks: to deliver a keynote speech on trauma, and to contact a friend’s daughter Ama, his “niece” who hasn’t called home in a while. Ama has been swept up in an immigration crackdown, and now her young son Tano is missing. Jean offers to help Attila by mobilizing her network volunteer fox spotters. Soon, rubbish men, security guards, hotel doormen, traffic wardens—mainly West African immigrants who work the myriad streets of London—come together to help. As the search for Tano continues, a deepening friendship between Attila and Jean unfolds. Attila’s time in London causes him to question his own ideas about trauma, the values of the society he finds himself in, and a personal grief of his own. In this delicate tale of love and loss, of thoughtless cruelty and unexpected community, Aminatta Forna asks us to consider our co-existence with one another and all living creatures, and the true nature of happiness.

The Hired Man

The Hired Man PDF Author: Aminatta Forna
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408818779
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
A powerful novel about the indelible effects of war and the memories which stir beneath the silence of a quiet Croatian town, from Orange Prize-shortlisted and Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning author Aminatta Forna 'Supremely masterful' INDEPENDENT 'The Hired Man seals her reputation as arguably the best writer of fiction in this field' EVENING STANDARD 'Terrific skill and insight' DAILY MAIL Gost is surrounded by mountains and fields of wild flowers. The summer sun burns. The Croatian winter brings freezing winds. Beyond the boundaries of the town an old house which has lain empty for years is showing signs of life. One of the windows, glass darkened with dirt, today stands open, and the lively chatter of English voices carries across the fallow fields. Laura and her teenage children have arrived. A short distance away lies the hut of Duro Kolak, who lives alone with his two hunting dogs. As he helps Laura with repairs to the old house, they uncover a mosaic beneath the ruined plaster and, in the rising heat of summer, painstakingly restore it. But Gost is not all it seems; conflicts long past still suppurate beneath the scars.

The Window Seat

The Window Seat PDF Author: Aminatta Forna
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802158595
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
“Gutsy, funny, risky and wise, full of dazzling late-night insight, in-the-middle-of-everything epiphanies, moments of sheer honesty blooming into gut truths.” —Marlon James, Booker Prize–winning author Aminatta Forna is one of our most important literary voices, and her novels have won the Windham Campbell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. In this elegantly rendered and wide-ranging collection of new and previously published essays, Forna writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human world. Movement is a constant here. In the title piece, “The Window Seat,” she reveals the unexpected enchantments of commercial air travel. In “Obama and the Renaissance Generation,” she documents how, despite the narrative of Obama’s exceptionalism, his father, like her own, was one of a generation of gifted young Africans who came to the United Kingdom and the United States for education and were expected to build their home countries anew after colonialism. In “The Last Vet,” time spent shadowing Dr. Jalloh, the only veterinarian in Sierra Leone, as he works with the street dogs of Freetown, becomes a meditation on what a society’s treatment of animals tells us about its principles. In “Crossroads,” she examines race in America from an African perspective, and in “Power Walking” she describes what it means to walk in the world in a Black woman’s body and in “The Watch” she explores the raptures of sleep and sleeplessness the world over. Deeply meditative and written with a wry humor, The Window Seat confirms that Forna is “a compelling essayist . . . her voice direct, lucid, and fearless” (Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine).

The Memory of Love

The Memory of Love PDF Author: Aminatta Forna
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802196004
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 615

Book Description
“[A] luminous tale of passion and betrayal” set in the post-colonial and civil war eras of Sierra Leone (The New York Times). Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book As a decade of civil war and political unrest comes to a devastating close, three men must reconcile themselves to their own fate and the fate of their broken nation. For Elias Cole, this means reflecting on his time as a young scholar in 1969 and the affair that defined his life. For Adrian Lockheart, it means listening to Elias’s tale and following his own heart into a heated romance. For Elias’s doctor, Kai Mansaray, it’s desperately battling his nightmares by trying to heal his patients. As each man’s story becomes inexorably bound with the others’, they discover that they are connected not only by their shared heritage, pain, and shame, but also by one remarkable woman. The Memory of Love is a beautiful and ambitious exploration of the influence history can have on generations, and the shared cultural burdens that each of us inevitably face. “A soft-spoken story of brutality and endurance set in postwar Sierra Leone . . . Tragedy and its aftermath are affectingly, memorably evoked in this multistranded narrative from a significant talent.” —Kirkus Reviews

August Gale

August Gale PDF Author: Barbara Walsh
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0762777095
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
An award-winning journalist’s voyage into her family history and her quest to face the storms she encounters there. In August Gale, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Barbara Walsh—who has interviewed killers, bad cops, and crooked politicians in the course of her career—faces the most challenging story of her lifetime: asking her father about his childhood pain. In the process, she takes us on two heartrending odysseys: one into a deadly Newfoundland hurricane and the lives of schooner fishermen who relied on God and the wind to carry them home; the other, into a squall stirred by a man with many secrets: a grandfather who remained a mystery until long after his death. Sixty-eight years after the hurricane that claimed several of her ancestors, Walsh searches for memories of the August gale and the grandfather who abandoned her dad as a young boy. Together, she and her father journey to Newfoundland to learn about the 1935 storm, and along the way her dad begins to talk about the man he cannot forgive. As she recreates the scenes of the violent hurricane and a small boy's tender past, she holds onto a hidden desire: to heal her father and redeem the grandfather she has never met.

Open Water

Open Water PDF Author: Caleb Azumah Nelson
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802157955
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35 WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION “Open Water is tender poetry, a love song to Black art and thought, an exploration of intimacy and vulnerability between two young artists learning to be soft with each other in a world that hardens against Black people.”—Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control. Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty. This is one of the most essential debut novels of recent years, heralding the arrival of a stellar and prodigious young talent.

Annette Feels Free

Annette Feels Free PDF Author: Katie Mazeika
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1665903449
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 44

Book Description
Discover the incredible true story of “The Original Mermaid,” Annette Kellerman, a girl who wanted to dance, swim, and feel free—and who grew into a woman who fought for the right to do just that! Annette loved to dance and twirl and pirouette. But when she got sick and had to start wearing braces on her legs, Annette stopped dancing. Until, one day, her dad took her swimming. Annette could finally dance again—in the water! She water danced her way to England, where she performed water ballets, attempted daring dives, and competed in swim races. When she competed against men (and won!), she realized it wasn’t fair that women had to swim in full skirts, so she made her own swimsuit, and fought for the right to wear it. Experience the journey of an independent and determined young woman, who swam, danced, dove, and designed so she could live her life feeling free.
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