Showing titles in African

Shad-Dari has escaped her past, her dreams now in reach. An excavator of the valuable old sounds of Órino-Rin, she steals tiny, unheard fragments of the sacred songs to erase the painful echo of her home planet, Ekwukwe. In one rebellion too far, she sets off a chain of events that severs her from time itself, forcing her, without another way forward, to face her past.

Avant, Gabriel faisait les quatre cents coups avec ses copains dans leur coin de paradis. Et puis l'harmonie familiale s'est disloquée en même temps que son "petit pays", le Burundi, ce bout d'Afrique centrale brutalement malmené par l'Histoire. Plus tard, Gabriel fait revivre un monde à jamais perdu. Les battements de cœur et les souffles coupés, les pensées profondes et les rires déployés, le parfum de citronnelle, les termites les jours d'orage, les jacarandas en fleur.

"Je suis la véritable trace, le plus solide des indices attestant de tout ce que nous avons vécu en dix ans en Algérie. Je cache l’histoire d’une guerre entière, inscrite sur ma peau depuis que je suis enfant." Aube est une jeune Algérienne qui doit se souvenir de la guerre d’indépendance, qu’elle n’a pas vécue, et oublier la guerre civile des années 1990, qu’elle a elle-même traversée. Sa tragédie est marquée sur son corps : une cicatrice au cou et des cordes vocales détruites. Muette, elle rêve de retrouver sa voix.

This is a minute-by-minute depiction of a typical night at a legendary monthly house party known as 'The Wickedest'. Here, we meet a vivid cast of characters, young and old, all surfing a revelry steeped in camaraderie, community, desire and a spirit of jubilant defiance. A modern epic, The Wickedest explores the institution of shoobs or house parties and their vital role within working-class communities. The poems range from classical English sonnets to experimental forms and are immersively interwoven with text messages and ephemera.

Omar Sharif leads an all-Egyptian cast in this three-part drama, recorded entirely in Egypt's capital. Adapted from Naguib Mahfouz's novels, this is a gripping family saga, with a monstrous father, a loving mother, and four children. It is set in seductive Cairo from 1917 to 1953, against a backdrop of political upheaval.

Inventory of a Life Mislaid follows Marina Warner’s beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how to be Mrs Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman.

Whilst it’s impossible to capture the essence of Nigeria in one story, its writers have given listeners the opportunity to experience the many different parts that make up Africa’s most populous nation. In Of This Our Country, acclaimed and award-winning Nigerian writers go a step further and describe their Nigeria, sharing personal essays about a country that holds so much more than any one perspective could. Through the words of these writers, a living portrait of Nigeria is woven, one that is as beautiful as it is complex.

With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls.

There is something about the boy. When he is angry, clouds darken. When he cries, rivers burst their banks. And when he touches a basketball, deities want courtside seats. Half Nigerian mortal, half Grecian god: Demi is the Half-God of Rainfall. His mother, Modupe, looks on with a mixture of pride and worry. From close encounters, she knows that gods are just like men: the same fragile egos, the same subsequent fury, the same sense of entitlement to the bodies of mortals. The gods will one day tire of sports fans, their fickle allegiances and their prayers to Demi.

When her husband dies, aging Miss Helen begins to fill her home in the remote South African bush with strange sculptures made from beer cans and old headlights. A local clergyman and a young woman visitor try to decide whether Miss Helen's peculiar art is an outpouring of creativity or an outbreak of madness.

Arrested in 1962 as South Africa's apartheid regime intensified its brutal campaign against political opponents, 44-year-old lawyer and African National Congress activist Nelson Mandela had no idea that he would spend the next 27 years in jail. During his 10,052 days of incarceration, Mandela wrote hundreds of letters to unyielding prison authorities, fellow activists, government officials, and, most memorably, his courageous wife, Winnie, and his five children. Now, 255 of these letters, a majority of which were previously unpublished, provide the most intimate portrait of Mandela since Long Walk to Freedom.

Kayo Chingonyi's remarkable second collection follows the course of a 'blood condition' as it finds its way to deeply personal grounds. From the banks of the Zambezi river to London and Leeds, these poems speak to how distance and time, nations and history can collapse within a body. With astonishing lyricism and musicality, this is a story of multiple inheritances—of grief and survival, renewal and the painful process of letting go—and a hymn to the people and places that run in our blood.

W.E.B. Du Bois, who drew from his own experiences as an African-American living in American society, explores the concept of "double-consciousness"—a term he uses to describe living as an African-American and having a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." With Du Bois' examination of Black life in post-Civil War America, his explanation of the meaning of emancipation and its effect, and his views on the roles of the black leaders of his time, The Souls of Black Folk is one of the important early works in the field of sociology.

The legends and fairy stories in this book belong to the Yoruba country of Southem Nigeria. They relate the adventures of men and animals, and try to explain the mysteries of nature - why women have long hair, how the leopard got his spots, and so forth. Most of them include very old songs, but these cannot here be given in full.

Translating as 'initiation', kumukanda is the name given to the rites a young boy from the Luvale tribe must pass through before he is considered a man. The poems of Kayo Chingonyi's remarkable debut explore this passage: between two worlds, ancestral and contemporary, between the living and the dead, between the gulf of who he is and how he is perceived. Underpinned by a love of music, language and literature, here is a powerful exploration of race, identity and masculinity, celebrating what it means to be British and not British, all at once.

The CliffsNotes study guide on Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart supplements the original literary work, giving you background information about the author, an introduction to the work, critical commentaries, and expanded glossaries, all for you to use as an educational tool that will allow you to better understand the work.

The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave is a study of slave making. It describes the rationale and the results of Anglo Saxon's ideas and methods of insuring the master/slave relationship. The infamous Willie Lynch letter gives both African and Caucasian students and teachers some insight, concerning the brutal and inhumane psychology behind the African slave trade.

It's the spring of '76. For Elsa, her affair with Stanwell may well prove lethal, as she's white and he's black, and they dared to fall in love in apartheid South Africa. The terrified lovers are the prey in a deadly manhunt from the golden city of Johannesburg to the exotic but dangerous wilds of the African Bushveld.

Amana hopes his dark secrets will never catch up with him. But when nearby villagers discover a mauled body near him, the residents assume the traveling monk is to blame. Amana suspects the grisly handiwork of a bloodthirsty, mythological creature. Determined to clear his name and catch the culprit, Amana follows the trail of bloody clues. When shadows from his own past tie in with the demonic attack, he's torn between his vow of pacifism and his duty to protect the defenseless.

“The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.