The Magic of Saida

The Magic of Saida PDF Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307961516
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Giller Prize–winner M. G. Vassanji gives us a powerfully emotional novel of love and loss, of an African/Indian man who returns to the town of his birth in search of the girl he once loved—and the sense of self that has always eluded him. Kamal Punja is a physician who has lived in Canada for the past forty years, but whom we first meet in a Tanzanian hospital. He is delirious and says he has been poisoned with hallucinogens. But when Kamal finds a curious and sympathetic ear in a local publisher, his ravings begin to reveal a tale of extraordinary pathos, complexity, and mystery. Raised by his African mother, deserted when he was four by his Indian father, married to a woman of Indian heritage, and the father of two wholly Westernized children, Kamal had reached a stage of both undreamed-of material success and disintegrating personal ties. Then, suddenly, he “stepped off the treadmill, allowed an old regret to awaken,” and set off to find the girl he had known as a child, to finally keep his promise to her that he would return. The girl was Saida, granddaughter of a great, beloved Swahili poet. Kamal and Saida were constant companions—he teaching her English and arithmetic, she teaching him Arabic script and Swahili poetry—and in his child’s mind, she was his future wife. Until, when he was eleven, his mother sent him to the capital, Dar es Salaam, to live with his father’s relatives, to “become an Indian” and thus secure his future. Now Kamal is journeying back to the village he left, into the maze of his long-unresolved mixed-race identity and the nightmarish legacy of his broken promise to Saida. At once dramatic, searching, and intelligent, The Magic of Saida moves deftly between the past and present, painting both an intimate picture of passion and betrayal and a broad canvas of political promise and failure in contemporary Africa. It is a timeless story—and a story very much of our own time.

The Magic of Saida

The Magic of Saida PDF Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307961516
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book Here

Book Description
Giller Prize–winner M. G. Vassanji gives us a powerfully emotional novel of love and loss, of an African/Indian man who returns to the town of his birth in search of the girl he once loved—and the sense of self that has always eluded him. Kamal Punja is a physician who has lived in Canada for the past forty years, but whom we first meet in a Tanzanian hospital. He is delirious and says he has been poisoned with hallucinogens. But when Kamal finds a curious and sympathetic ear in a local publisher, his ravings begin to reveal a tale of extraordinary pathos, complexity, and mystery. Raised by his African mother, deserted when he was four by his Indian father, married to a woman of Indian heritage, and the father of two wholly Westernized children, Kamal had reached a stage of both undreamed-of material success and disintegrating personal ties. Then, suddenly, he “stepped off the treadmill, allowed an old regret to awaken,” and set off to find the girl he had known as a child, to finally keep his promise to her that he would return. The girl was Saida, granddaughter of a great, beloved Swahili poet. Kamal and Saida were constant companions—he teaching her English and arithmetic, she teaching him Arabic script and Swahili poetry—and in his child’s mind, she was his future wife. Until, when he was eleven, his mother sent him to the capital, Dar es Salaam, to live with his father’s relatives, to “become an Indian” and thus secure his future. Now Kamal is journeying back to the village he left, into the maze of his long-unresolved mixed-race identity and the nightmarish legacy of his broken promise to Saida. At once dramatic, searching, and intelligent, The Magic of Saida moves deftly between the past and present, painting both an intimate picture of passion and betrayal and a broad canvas of political promise and failure in contemporary Africa. It is a timeless story—and a story very much of our own time.

Soulstream

Soulstream PDF Author: Saida Woolf
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1949514714
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Soulstream is an all-ages fantasy superhero comic book series about a team of magic-wielding teenagers fighting to save another dimension, created by Saida Woolf and published by Scout Comics. It’s almost the end of Winter Break, and Marie is on a reluctant hike through the woods with her brother when they discover a mysterious portal and find themselves in another dimension. Marie is contacted by the Mage Goddess, who gives her the magical Ocean Bracelet, an item that allows her to transform into the superhero Soulstream. With her newfound powers, and the help of her friends, she embarks on a quest to save the Shattered World.

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall PDF Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0307371921
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Giller Prize-winner M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a haunting novel of corruption and regret that brings to life the complexity and turbulence of Kenyan society in the last five decades. Rich in sensuous detail and historical insight, this is a powerful story of passionate betrayals and political violence, racial tension and the strictures of tradition, told in elegant, assured prose. The novel begins in 1953, with eight-year-old Vikram Lall a witness to the celebrations around the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, just as the Mau Mau guerilla war for independence from Britain begins to gain strength. In a land torn apart by idealism, doubt, political upheaval and terrible acts of violence, Vic and his sister Deepa must find their place among a new generation. Neither colonists nor African, neither white nor black, the Indian brother and sister find themselves somewhere in between in their band of playmates: Bill and Annie, British children, and Njoroge, an African boy. These are the relationships that will shape the rest of their lives. We follow Vikram through the changes in East African society, the immense promise of the fifties and sixties. But when that hope is betrayed by the corruption and violence of the following decades, Vic is drawn into the Kenyatta government’s orbit of graft and power-broking. Njoroge, his childhood friend, can abandon neither the idealism of his youth nor his love for Vic’s sister Deepa. But neither the idealism of the one nor the passive cynicism of the other can avert the tragedies that await them. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a profound and careful examination of one man’s search for his place in the world, with themes that have run through Vassanji’s work: the nature of community in a volatile society, the relations between colony and colonizer, and the inescapable presence of the past. It is also, finally, a deeply personal book speaking to the people who are in the in-between.

And Home Was Kariakoo

And Home Was Kariakoo PDF Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0385671458
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
From M.G. Vassanji, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and a Governor General's Literary Award winner for Non-fiction, comes a poignant love letter to his birthplace and homeland, East Africa—a powerful and surprising portrait that only an insider could write. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part history-rarely-told, here is a powerful and timely portrait of a constantly evolving land. From a description of Zanzibar and its evolution to a visit to a slave-market town at Lake Tanganyika; from an encounter with a witchdoctor in an old coastal village to memories of his own childhood in the streets of Dar es Salaam and the suburbs of Nairobi, Vassanji combines brilliant prose, thoughtful and candid observation, and a lifetime of revisiting and reassessing the continent that molded him—and, as we discover when we follow the journeys that became this book, shapes him still.

Amriika

Amriika PDF Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 1551997096
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Amriika is a novel of betrayal, disillusionment, and discovery set in America during three highly charged decades in the nation’s history. In the late sixties, Ramji, a student from Dar es Salaam, East Africa, arrives in an America far different from the one he dreamed about, one caught up in anti-war demonstrations, revolutionary lifestyles, and spiritual quests. As Ramji finds himself pulled by the tumultuous currents of those troubled times, he is swept up in events whose consequences will haunt him for years to come. Decades later in a changed America, having recently left a marriage and a suburban existence, an older Ramji, passionately in love, finds himself drawn into a set of circumstances which hold terrifying reminders of the past and its unanswered questions.

No New Land

No New Land PDF Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Emblem Editions
ISBN: 155199707X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Nurdin Lalani and his family, Asian immigrants from Africa, have come to the Toronto suburb of Don Mills only to find that the old world and its values pursue them. A genial orderly at a downtown hospital, he has been accused of sexually assaulting a girl. Although he is innocent, traditional propriety prompts him to question the purity of his own thoughts. Ultimately, his friendship with the enlightened Sushila offers him an alluring freedom from a past that haunts him, a marriage that has become routine, and from the trials of coping with teenage children. Introducing us to a cast of vividly drawn characters within this immigrant community, Vassanji is a keen observer of lives caught between one world and another.

The Book of Secrets

The Book of Secrets PDF Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1250109183
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In 1988, a retired schoolteacher named Pius Fernandes receives an old diary found in the back room of an East African shop. Written in 1913 by a British colonial administrator, the diary captivates Fernandes, who begins to research the coded history he encounters in its terse, laconic entries. What he uncovers is a story of forbidden liaisons and simmering vengeances, family secrets and cultural exiles--a story that leads him on an investigative journey through his own past and Africa's.

Magic Strikes

Magic Strikes PDF Author: Ilona Andrews
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780441017027
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
When magic strikes and Atlanta goes to pieces, it’s a job for mercenary Kate Daniels in this thrilling novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling series. Drafted into working for the Order of Merciful Aid, mercenary Kate Daniels has more paranormal problems than she knows what to do with these days. And in Atlanta, where magic comes and goes like the tide, that’s saying a lot. But when Kate's werewolf friend Derek is discovered nearly dead, she must confront her greatest challenge yet. As her investigation leads her to the Midnight Games—an invitation only, no holds barred, ultimate preternatural fighting tournament—she and Curran, the Lord of the Beasts, uncover a dark plot that may forever alter the face of Atlanta's shapeshifting community...

A Place Within

A Place Within PDF Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
ISBN: 0307371778
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
A Globe and Mail Best Book The inimitable M.G. Vassanji turns his eye to India, the homeland of his ancestors, in this powerfully moving tale of family and country. Part travelogue, part history, A Place Within is M.G. Vassanji’s intelligent and beautifully written journey to explore where he belongs. It would take many lifetimes, it was said to me during my first visit, to see all of India. The desperation must have shown on my face to absorb and digest all I possibly could. This was not something I had articulated or resolved; and yet I recall an anxiety as I travelled the length and breadth of the country, senses raw to every new experience, that even in the distraction of a blink I might miss something profoundly significant. I was not born in India, nor were my parents; that might explain much in my expectation of that visit. Yet how many people go to the homeland of their grandparents with such a heartload of expectation and momentousness; such a desire to find themselves in everything they see? Is it only India that clings thus, to those who’ve forsaken it; is this why Indians in a foreign land seem always so desperate to seek each other out? What was India to me?

The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories

The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories PDF Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Heinemann
ISBN: 9780435905668
Category : Africa
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
A collection of 20 stories written between 1980-1991 which deal with themes relevant to various regions of Africa.