<div>&ldquo;[An] elegantly written mix of complex history, riveting memoir and damning expos&eacute;,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s actions. After war had abated in Sierra Leone, Aminatta&rsquo;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&rsquo;s fate and her country&rsquo;s destiny, she uncovers a harrowing web of intrigue, conspiracy, and painful revelations. The Devil That Danced on the Water is an &ldquo;extremely moving&rdquo; memoir of family, heritage, and innocence lost (The Guardian).</div>

The Devil That Danced on the Water

<div>From the award-winning author: A &ldquo;wonderfully ambitious&rdquo; novel of West Africa, told through the struggles and dreams of four extraordinary women (The Guardian). When a cousin offers Abie her family&rsquo;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&mdash;Asana, Mariama, Hawa, and Serah&mdash;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&rsquo;s aunts weave a tale of a nation&rsquo;s descent into chaos&mdash;and their own individual struggles to claim their destiny. Hailed by Marie Claire as &ldquo;a fascinating evocation of the experience of African women, and all that has been gained&mdash;and lost&mdash;with the passing of old traditions,&rdquo; Ancestor Stones is a powerful exploration of family, culture, heritage, and hope. &ldquo;This is [Forna&rsquo;s] first novel, but it is too sophisticated to read like one.&rdquo; &mdash;The Guardian</div>

Buy From US

Kobo

Google

Barnes & Noble

Apple

Amazon

Ancestor Stones

<div>&ldquo;[A] luminous tale of passion and betrayal&rdquo; set in the post-colonial and civil war eras of Sierra Leone (The New York Times). Winner of the Commonwealth Writers&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s tale and following his own heart into a heated romance. For Elias&rsquo;s doctor, Kai Mansaray, it&rsquo;s desperately battling his nightmares by trying to heal his patients. As each man&rsquo;s story becomes inexorably bound with the others&rsquo;, 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. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; &mdash;Kirkus Reviews</div>

The Memory of Love

<div>An award-winning Scottish and Sierra Leonean novelist &ldquo;brilliantly portrays the atmosphere&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s hostility, volatile secrets begin to bubble to the surface&mdash;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. &ldquo;Not since Remains of the Day has an author so skillfully revealed the way history&rsquo;s layers are invisible to all but it&rsquo;s participants, who do what they must to survive&rdquo; (The Boston Globe).</div>

The Hired Man

<div>The prize-winning author of The Memory of Love investigates London&rsquo;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&mdash;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&rsquo;s daughter Ama, his &ldquo;niece&rdquo; who hasn&rsquo;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&mdash;mainly West African immigrants who work the myriad streets of London&mdash;come together to help. As the search for Tano continues, a deepening friendship between Attila and Jean unfolds. Attila&rsquo;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.</div>

Happiness

<div>“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).</div>

Aminatta Forna
Follow this author

Books By Aminatta Forna (6 Books)

The Devil That Danced on the Water

Ancestor Stones

The Memory of Love

The Hired Man

Happiness

The Window Seat

Get weekly updates and deals from Early Bird Books

More from

Corporate

© 2024 OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA