In this heartwarming and moving book, journalist Aminatta Forna
deals with two big issues: her childhood in Scotland and Sierra
Leone, and the tragic murder of her father, a talented doctor who
became caught up with politics and was executed as a result. Not
just a childhood memoir, the book is much broader in its scope,
revealing what African life is like both in its brutality and its
beauty, which Forna describes with painful emotion. In later life,
armed with a strong sense of incompleteness and a desire for
justice, she went back to see what went wrong and to meet those who
took part in her father's downfall. Mohammed Forna, her father,
married a Scotswoman while studying in Aberdeen, but his real love
was his country, Sierra Leone. There he took on the heavy and
dangerous responsibility of government, becoming minister of
finance. When he became a political prisoner, the family fled to
London. Although the core of the book is the death of Dr Forna, the
author writes with unflinching honesty about her experiences as a
child as she travelled from one country to another and of the
complicated extended family of which she was part. In the early
1970s racism was very much part of life for the young Aminatta -
the cruelties of ostracism in London make uncomfortable reading as
does the barbarism and inhumanity that resulted when Sierra Leone
became corrupted and both government and people lost their way,
leading to ghastly atrocities. The book has been compared to White
Swans in its scope; it has an enormous generosity and warmth
combined with a sensitive exploration of the universal themes of
man's inhumanity to man, betrayal, courage and the pressing need
for truth. (Kirkus UK)
''She has lifted out of herself the emotional and cultural world of her childhood and represented it in scenes of startling beauty and tragedy. Few books merit being called courageous, this one does.''
Rachel Cusk, 'Evening Standard'
Aminatta Forna's intensely personal history is a passionate and vivid account of an African childhood, of an idyll which 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.
''Forna has written a book that is impossible to forget…This is an obsessive, driven, refreshing book about Africa, despotism and exile. It is also a beautifully drawn portrait of childhood…Teeming with life, anger, love…it is a triumph of life against the odds. And in its conclusion there is a sanity that is, simply, majestic.''
Christopher Hope, 'Independent'
''A deeply affecting and beautifully written book which transcends the sordid story of a power-hungry, murderous and corrupt regime…It emerges defiantly as an uplifting and marvellously readable memoir.''
Justin Marozzi, 'Financial Times'
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