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

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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: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0006531261
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 11

Get Book Here

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 : 427

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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

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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

The Hired Man

The Hired Man PDF Author: Aminatta Forna
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802193102
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
An award-winning Scottish and Sierra Leonean novelist “brilliantly portrays the atmosphere” of Croatia in this haunting tale of war, history, and secrets (The Guardian). Visitors are not common in the small Croatian village of Gost, so Duro is surprised to see a strange car pull up to a well-known farmhouse just outside of town. Laura, a British woman, and her two children are refurbishing the home to be their summer cottage, and Duro agrees to lend a hand, becoming Laura’s confidant along the way. But the rest of the residents of Gost are not so pleased to have outsiders in their midst. As Duro works to shield Laura and her family from the town’s hostility, volatile secrets begin to bubble to the surface—secrets that could threaten everyone in the seemingly sleepy town, even the unwitting new residents. The Hired Man is a story of lost love, dangerous history, and quiet malice. “Not since Remains of the Day has an author so skillfully revealed the way history’s layers are invisible to all but it’s participants, who do what they must to survive” (The Boston Globe).

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

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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

The Window Seat

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

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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).

Happiness

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

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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 Water Dancer

The Water Dancer PDF Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0399590609
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom. “This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.”—San Francisco Chronicle IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, directed by Nia DaCosta, and produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • Vanity Fair • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • Paste • Town & Country • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures. This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen. Praise for The Water Dancer “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations—and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy.”—Rolling Stone

Hard To Dance With the Devil On Your Back

Hard To Dance With the Devil On Your Back PDF Author: Ray Buckley
Publisher: Abingdon Press
ISBN: 1426733526
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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Book Description
In every culture and time, persons of faith, of all ages, have summoned trials and tribulations to find the endurance and strength to “dance.” They have danced with the weight of the world upon their shoulders, sustained by God and others dancing near them. Hard to Dance With the Devil On Your Back is a seven-session Lenten study that looks at the transcendent struggle in the lives of believers, while helping us to enter the continually crumbling world surrounding Jesus and the disciples in the days preceding Jesus. Appropriate for both group and individual use, the study provides one lesson for each week in Lent. Each lesson includes a Scripture reference, a brief reading, questions for reflection or discussion, a brief prayer, and a focus for the coming week.

August Gale

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

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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.