political

Saman

Saman is a story filtered through the lives of its feisty female protagonists and the enigmatic “hero” Saman. It is at once an exposé of the oppression of plantation workers in South Sumatra, a lyrical quest to understand the place of religion and spirituality in contemporary lives, a playful exploration of female sexuality and a story about love in all its guises, while touching on all of Indonesia's taboos: extramarital sex, political repression and the relationship between Christians and Muslims. Saman has taken the Indonesian literary world by storm, and is now available for the first time in English.

“Ayu Utami is a groundbreaking novelist, whose Saman (1998) is credited with ushering in a sea of change in the nation’s storytelling by daring to deal with sex and politics in a way that was previously off-limits for female authors. This shift is known as sastra wangi. with some people at the time anecdotally referring to the women writers in the movement as the ‘cliterati’.” —Ann Morgan

(A special thank you to book club members, Eydis West & Beth Cummings for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Achebe’s critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

“[Achebe] is one of world literature’s great humane voices.” —Times Literary Supplement

“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama 

“Achebe’s influence should go on and on . . . teaching and reminding that all humankind is one.” —The Nation

“The first novel in English which spoke from the interior of an African character, rather than portraying the African as exotic, as the white man would see him.” —Soyinka

“The Founding Father of the African novel in English.” —The Guardian

(Group read suggestion from Julie Jacobs, book club moderator.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Exit West

Finalist for the Booker Prize & winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize for Fiction & the Aspen Words Literary Prize
 
A New York Times bestseller, the astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands…
 
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . .

Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

“A breathtaking novel…[that] arrives at an urgent time.” —NPR
 
“It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world, and gave us a road map to our future… At once terrifying and … oddly hopeful.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Moving, audacious, and indelibly human.” —Entertainment Weekly, “A” rating

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

My Persian Paradox

On a cold night in 1978, seven-year-old Shabnam Shahmohammad clung to her mother in a Tehran apartment while the sounds of gunshots rang out in the street: The Iranian Revolution was at hand. She and her family survived that night, but as the Islamic fundamentalists took the power over, she grew up watching her father take his beloved books away to burn, his friends be arrested and disappear, and women like her mother grow ever more marginalized. Confused by her father’s communist ideology, her mother’s conservative religious beliefs, and the regime’s oppressive rules, she developed a deep longing to live a different life.

Finding herself being married at 19, she naively dreamed to team up and discover an adventurous life. When she gave birth to a daughter whose future, she realized, mattered more to her than her own, she had to find a way to unlock her little girl’s possibilities. She longed to emigrate, but with Western countries’ embassies mostly absent from Tehran, options for escaping Iran were limited.

My Persian Paradox is a tale of resilience facing oppression and dictatorship along with fighting with narrow traditional and restrictive cultural rules. This memoir is a journey of self-discovery, mother-daughter relationship obstacles, forbidden love, and the universal desire for freedom.

”The difference between Shabnam's choices and those of many Iranian women lies in her determination to realize her dreams against all odds: dreams that evolve into a bid for freedom under impossible circumstances … Shabnam's survey of past and present ideals and their impact on her ability to assimilate makes for an engrossing survey that goes beyond most immigrant stories.” —Midwest Book Review

(Group read suggestion from Gemma Ware, book club moderator.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Prisoner of Tehran

In her heartbreaking, triumphant, and elegantly written memoir, Marina Nemat tells the heart-pounding story of her life as a young girl in Iran during the early days of the brutal Islamic Revolution.

What would you give up to protect your loved ones? Your life?

In January 1982, Marina Nemat, then just 16, was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death for political crimes. Until then, her life in Tehran had centered around school, summer parties at the lake, and her crush on Andre, the young man she had met at church. But when math and history were subordinated to the study of the Koran and political propaganda, Marina protested. Her teacher replied, “If you don't like it, leave.” She did, and, to her surprise, other students followed.

Soon she was arrested with hundreds of other youths who had dared to speak out, and they were taken to the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Two guards interrogated her. One beat her into unconsciousness; the other, Ali, fell in love with her.

Sentenced to death for refusing to give up the names of her friends, she was minutes from being executed when Ali, using his family connections to Ayatollah Khomeini, plucked her from the firing squad and had her sentence reduced to life in prison. But he exacted a shocking price—with a dizzying combination of terror and tenderness, he asked her to marry him and abandon her Christian faith for Islam. If she didn't, he would see to it that her family was harmed. She spent the next two years as a prisoner of the state, and of the man who held her life, and her family's lives, in his hands.

Lyrical, passionate, and suffused throughout with grace and sensitivity, Marina Nemat's memoir is like no other. Her search for emotional redemption envelops her jailers, her husband and his family, and the country of her birth—each of whom she grants the greatest gift of all: forgiveness.

“Nemat's engaging memoir is rich with complex characters...[she] offers her arresting, heartbreaking story of forgiveness, hope and enduring love—a voice for the untold scores silenced by Iran's revolution.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Rooftops of Tehran

An unforgettable debut novel of young love and coming of age in an Iran headed toward revolution.

In this poignant, eye-opening and emotionally vivid novel, Seraji lays bare the beauty and brutality of the centuries-old Persian culture, while reaffirming the human experiences we all share.

In a middle-class neighborhood of Iran’s sprawling capital city, 17-year-old Pasha Shahed spends the summer of 1973 on his rooftop with his best friend Ahmed, joking around one minute and asking burning questions about life the next. He also hides a secret love for his beautiful neighbor Zari, who has been betrothed since birth to another man. But the bliss of Pasha and Zari’s stolen time together is shattered when Pasha unwittingly acts as a beacon for the Shah’s secret police. The violent consequences awaken him to the reality of living under a powerful despot, and lead Zari to make a shocking choice.

“Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.” –Kirkus

“Charmingly romantic…Seraji captures the thoughts and emotions of a young boy and creates a moving portrait of the history and customs of the Persians and life in Iran.”
–Publisher’s Weekly

(Group read suggestion from Sue Attalla, book club moderator.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

A New Look at Jonestown

The 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana is considered one of the greatest peacetime horrors. Almost all of the lives lost were Americans. The death toll exceeded 900, including some 300 who were age 17 and under, making this one of the largest mass deaths in American history.

At the time, Guyanese Prime Minister Burnham dismissed it as “an American problem.” All the books until now on the subject were written by people from outside Guyana. This book is the first by a Guyanese resident and is now available in the US for the first time.

Jim Jones was a charismatic US cult leader who founded what became the Peoples Temple in the 1950s. Following negative media attention in the 1970s, the powerful, controlling preacher moved with some 1,000 of his followers to the Guyanese jungle, where he promised they would establish a utopian community.

On November 18, 1978, U.S. Representative Leo Ryan went to Jonestown to investigate claims of abuse and was murdered along with four members of his delegation. That same day, Jones ordered his followers to ingest poison-laced punch while armed guards stood by. In total, 918 lives were lost.

This is the story of Jonestown finally told from a Guyanese perspective, written by one of Guyana’s most distinguished political leaders who is often referred to as “Guyana’s Gandhi.” Also included are excerpts from the writings of several other Guyanese, including George Danns, Walter Rodney, and Jan Carew.

“A New Look at Jonestown is an elucidating, mesmerising read that transcends Jones' captivating, precipitous slide into madness..” —The Gleaner

“Well worth reading.” —Kaieteur News

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Unavailable from Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

I Will Never See the World Again

Best Book of the Year – Bloomberg News

A resilient Turkish writer’s inspiring account of his imprisonment that provides crucial insight into political censorship amidst the global rise of authoritarianism.

The destiny I put down in my novel has become mine. I am now under arrest like the hero I created years ago. I await the decision that will determine my future, just as he awaited his. I am unaware of my destiny, which has perhaps already been decided, just as he was unaware of his. I suffer the pathetic torment of profound helplessness, just as he did.

Like a cursed oracle, I foresaw my future years ago not knowing that it was my own.

Confined in a cell four meters long, imprisoned on absurd, Kafkaesque charges, novelist Ahmet Altan is one of many writers persecuted by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s oppressive regime. In this extraordinary memoir, written from his prison cell, Altan reflects upon his sentence, on a life whittled down to a courtyard covered by bars, and on the hope and solace a writer’s mind can provide, even in the darkest places.

“Urgent…brilliant…a timeless testament to the art and power of writing amid Orwellian repression.” —Washington Post

“Remarkable…Altan’s talent allowed him to communicate his experience in rich, haunting detail…Despite the oppressive, cruel darkness at the core of Altan’s memoir, his words shine like bioluminescent creatures patrolling the abyss…brilliant.” —NPR

“The title of Mr. Altan’s book is the statement of a brutal fact, rather than a cry of despair. There is not a smidgen of self-pity in the memoir’s 212 pages. What emerges is this: You cannot jail my mind, and you cannot shut me up.” —New York Times

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Blue Label

Winner of the Arturo Uslar Pietri award for Latin American literature & shortlisted for the Critics Award of Venezuela

Eugenia Blanc, a young Caraqueñan and quintessential teenager at war with the world around her, has one aim: after graduating from high school, to abandon Venezuela definitively. She embarks on a spontaneous road trip in a banged-up Fiat with her rebellious classmate Luis Tévez, in search of her grandfather, the one person who can provide her with the documents that would allow her to leave the country. While Eugenia and Luis’s tentative, troubled romance unfolds during the Chávez era, the story also looks back at Venezuela’s “lost decade” of the 1990s, a time of intractable violence, inequality, corruption, and instability that led to Chávez’s election.

With an unvarnished fluidity that brings to mind Jack Kerouac and a crazy-ass playlist that ranges from REM to Bob Dylan to El Canto del Loco to Shakira, Blue Label is an audacious, dark novel with a gut-punch of an ending; the prize-winning book by a writer who has cemented his reputation as a major Latin American voice.

“Blue Label is a wickedly well-written novel, with electric prose that delivers one jolt after another, a subtle and joyful sense of humor, an intoxicating infectiousness, a complex character about whom we want to know everything, and an ending that leaves the reader with a feeling of sweet melancholy. It’s a book we’ll be talking about for years to come.” ―Daniel Saldaña París

“One part Scheherazade, two parts Boccaccio, a twist of Bolaño, and a dash of bitters. Blue Label is intoxicating, hilarious, and the best novel on the calamity that is today's Venezuela.” —Carmen Boullosa

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

It Would be Night in Caracas

In Caracas, Venezuela, Adelaida Falcón stands over an open grave. Alone, she buries her mother—the only family she has ever known—and worries that when night falls thieves will rob the grave. Even the dead cannot find peace here.

Adelaida had a stable childhood in a prosperous Venezuela that accepted immigrants in search of a better life, where she lived with her single-mother in a humble apartment. But now? Every day she lines up for bread that will inevitably be sold out by the time she reaches the registers. Every night she tapes her windows to shut out the tear gas raining down on protesters. When looters masquerading as revolutionaries take over her apartment, Adelaida must make a series of gruesome choices in order to survive in a country disintegrating into anarchy, where citizens are increasingly pitted against each other. But just how far is she willing to go?

A bold new voice from Latin America, Karina Sainz Borgo’s touching, thrilling debut is an ode to the Venezuelan people and a chilling reminder of how quickly the world we know can crumble.

“Dry, concise, direct, with an extraordinary stirring force… Sainz Borgo’s novel is simply masterful.” —Fernando Aramburu

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

The Last Days of El Commandante

President Hugo Chávez’s cancer looms large over Venezuela in 2012, casting a shadow of uncertainty and creating an atmosphere of secrets, lies, and upheaval across the country. This literary thriller follows the connected lives of several Caracas neighbors consumed by the turmoil surrounding the Venezuelan president’s impending death.

Retired oncologist Miguel Sanabria, seeing the increasingly combustible world around him, feels on constant edge. He finds himself at odds with his wife, an extreme anti-Chavista, and his radical Chavista brother. These feelings grow when his nephew asks him to undertake the perilous task of hiding cell-phone footage of Chávez in Cuba. Fredy Lecuna, an unemployed journalist, takes a job writing a book about Chávez’s condition, which requires him to leave for Cuba while his landlord attempts to kick his wife and son out of their apartment. Nine-year-old María, long confined to an apartment with a neurotic mother intensely fearful of the city’s violence, finds her only contact with the outside world through a boy she messages online.

“The stories Barrera Tyszka presents [in The Last Days of El Comandante] offer a solid slice of the uncertainty of Venezuelan life of the time…Barrera Tyszka is particularly good on the everyday—and also on the odd Cuban connection and the complex interplay between Cuban (national and personal) interests and Venezuelan ones at the time.” —The Complete Review

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

The Sorrow of War

The daring and controversial novel that took the world by storm—a story of politics, selfhood, survival, and war.

Heart-wrenching, fragmented, raw, former Vietcong soldier Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed everything.

In this novel of North Vietnam, Kien, a lone survivor from the Glorious 27th Youth brigade of the Vietcong, revisits the haunting sites of battles and relives a parade of horrors, as he grapples with his ghosts, his alcoholism and attempts to arrange his life in writing.

Published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its nonheroic, non-ideological tone, this now classic work has won worldwide acclaim and become an international bestseller.

“Vaults over all the American fiction that came out of the Vietnam War to take its place alongside the greatest war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. This is to understate its qualities, for, unlike All Quiet, it is about much more than war. A book about writing, about lost youth, it is also a beautiful, agonizing love story.” —The Independent

“Dramatic . . . Chronicle[s] the wrecked lives of North Vietnamese soldiers who enter the war with blazing idealism, only to sink deeper into disillusionment and pessimism as everything they know falls apart around them.” —The Washington Post

“Powerful . . . A remarkable emotional intensity builds as the author mixes harrowing flashback scenes from the war with images from his pastoral youth, from his heartbreaking homecoming after a decade away, and finally from the nightmare calamity that gives the book its tragic power.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

(A special thank you to book club member, Eydis West for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

It was Only Yesterday

It was Only Yesterday is an insider's story about life as a royal teenager and growing up in the Jubilee Palace in Africa’s first royal family under the protective eyes of her great grand-father Emperor Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lion of Judah, and Elect of God. In February 1974, her privileged life comes to an abrupt end with the advent of a bloody upheaval which overthrows her great grand-father’s government and lands her mother and close family in a rotting Communist jail. By this time, Hannah Mariam has fled to United Kingdom where she is granted status as a refugee.

Interested in writing from a very young age, her first book It was Only Yesterday offers unique insights about the hardship she faced growing up in a new setting and how she effectively managed change and uncertainty. It was Only Yesterday is a delightful account of her interactions with friends and family in the backdrop of the intricate world of imperial protocol and palace politics. The book’s narrative is based on diaries kept over the past forty-three years, a collection of family photographs, informal chats and interviews, generational stories, and researching academic books about her great grand-father and family. A promising new author, her readers will enjoy how she has interwoven personal experiences with firsthand knowledge of her great grand-father, one of the world’s longest reigning monarchs and an important historical figure in Ethiopian, African and world history. The book’s memoir genre will appeal to all, in particular to those interested in understanding the cultural, social, political and historical ramifications of pre-socialist Ethiopia of 1974.

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

A Burning

For readers of Tommy Orange, Yaa Gyasi, and Jhumpa Lahiri, an electrifying debut novel about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise—to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies—and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India.

In this National Book Award Longlist honoree and “gripping thriller with compassionate social commentary” (USA Today), Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan’s fall. Lovely—an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor—has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.

Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning has the force of an epic while being so masterfully compressed it can be read in a single sitting. Majumdar writes with dazzling assurance at a breakneck pace on complex themes that read here as the components of a thriller: class, fate, corruption, justice, and what it feels like to face profound obstacles and yet nurture big dreams in a country spinning toward extremism. An extraordinary debut.

“Powerful… propulsive…This is a book to relish for its details, for the caress of the writer’s gaze against the world.” —The New York Times

“A gripping thriller with compassionate social commentary… It’s hard not to feel intense heartache while reading A Burning. Majumdar’s powerful debut is carefully crafted for maximum impact, carving out the most urgent parts of its characters for the whole world to see. This novel rightfully commands attention.” —USA Today

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Funny Boy

Lambda Literary Award Winner

An evocative coming-of-age novel about growing up gay in Sri Lanka during the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict—one of the country’s most turbulent and deadly periods.

Arjie is “funny.”

The second son of a privileged family in Sri Lanka, he prefers staging make-believe wedding pageants with his female cousins to battling balls with the other boys. When his parents discover his innocent pastime, Arjie is forced to abandon his idyllic childhood games and adopt the rigid rules of an adult world. Bewildered by his incipient sexual awakening, mortified by the bloody Tamil-Sinhalese conflicts that threaten to tear apart his homeland, Arjie painfully grows toward manhood and an understanding of his own “different” identity.

Set in the mannered, lush world of upper middle class Tamils in Sri Lanka, this deeply moving novel, though not autobiographical, draws on Selvadurai’s experience of being gay in Sri Lanka and growing up during the escalating violence between the Buddhist Sinhala majority and Hindu Tamil minority in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Refreshing, raw, and poignant, Funny Boy is an exquisitely written, compassionate tale of a boy’s coming-of-age that quietly confounds expectations of love, family, and country as it delivers the powerful message of staying true to one’s self no matter the obstacles.

“Selvadurai writes as sensitively about the emotional intensity of adolescence as he does about the wonder of childhood.” —New York Times Book Review

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Death in the Andes

Written by the 2010 Nobel Prize winning author & “Peru's best novelist—one of the world's best.” —The New Yorker

In a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared. Peruvian Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomás have been dispatched to investigate, and to guard the town from the Shining Path guerrillas they assume are responsible. But the townspeople do not trust the officers, and they have their own ideas about what forces claimed the bodies of the missing men. To pass the time, and to cope with their homesickness, Tomás entertains Lituma nightly with the sensuous, surreal tale of his precarious love affair with a wayward prostitute. His stories are intermingled with the ongoing mystery of the missing men.

Death in the Andes is an atmospheric suspense story and a political allegory, a panoramic view of contemporary Peru from one of the world's great novelists.

“Remarkable . . . a fantastically picturesque landscape of Indians and llamas, snowy peaks, hunger, and violence.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Meticulously realistic descriptions of this high, unforgiving landscape and the haunted people who perch there . . . merge into a surreal portrait of a place both specific and universal.” —Time

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

The Blue Hour

Adrián Ormache, a high-flying lawyer with a beautiful wife and two daughters, leads a privileged and glamorous life in one of Lima’s wealthiest neighborhoods. But when his mother dies, he discovers a letter amongst her possessions making shocking claims about her now long-dead husband, Adrián’s father—a commander in the army during the Peruvian Civil War of the 1980s. As well as being linked to atrocities committed against the ‘Shining Path’ guerrillas, it appears that he also kidnapped and kept a local girl, whose family now seeks retribution.

Shocked out of his comfortable existence, Adrián becomes obsessed with finding the girl and sets out to face the harrowing realities of Peru’s recent past, and uncover the truth about his father.

“The strength of the plot pivots on the lovers’ ambiguous feelings for one another—the intensity of their mismatched love and hatred is perfectly drawn.” —Times Literary Supplement

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Unavailable via Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Country of My Skull

Ever since Nelson Mandela dramatically walked out of prison in 1990 after 27 years behind bars, South Africa has been undergoing a radical transformation. In one of the most miraculous events of the century, the oppressive system of apartheid was dismantled. Repressive laws mandating separation of the races were thrown out. The country, which had been carved into a crazy quilt that reserved the most prosperous areas for whites and the most desolate and backward for blacks, was reunited. The dreaded and dangerous security force, which for years had systematically tortured, spied upon, and harassed people of color and their white supporters, was dismantled. But how could this country—one of spectacular beauty and promise—come to terms with its ugly past? How could its people, whom the oppressive white government had pitted against one another, live side by side as friends and neighbors?

To begin the healing process, Nelson Mandela created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by the renowned cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Established in 1995, the commission faced the awesome task of hearing the testimony of the victims of apartheid as well as the oppressors. Amnesty was granted to those who offered a full confession of any crimes associated with apartheid. Since the commission began its work, it has been the central player in a drama that has riveted the country. In this book, Antjie Krog, a South African journalist and poet who has covered the work of the commission, recounts the drama, the horrors, the wrenching personal stories of the victims and their families. Through the testimonies of victims of abuse and violence, from the appearance of Winnie Mandela to former South African president P. W. Botha’s extraordinary courthouse press conference, this award-winning poet leads us on an amazing journey.

(A special thank you to book club member, Jennifer Koen for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

I Write What I Like

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Like all of Steve Biko’s writings, those words testify to the passion, courage, and keen insight that made him one of the most powerful figures in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. They also reflect his conviction that black people in South Africa could not be liberated until they united to break their chains of servitude, a key tenet of the Black Consciousness movement that he helped found.

I Write What I Like contains a selection of Biko’s writings from 1969, when he became the president of the South African Students’ Organization, to 1972, when he was prohibited from publishing. The collection also includes a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; an introduction by Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana, who were both involved with Biko in the Black Consciousness movement; a memoir of Biko by Father Aelred Stubbs, his longtime pastor and friend; and a new foreword by Professor Lewis Gordon.

Biko’s writings will inspire and educate anyone concerned with issues of racism, postcolonialism, and black nationalism.

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Neighbours

“On the eve of the Muslim festival of Eid, Narguiss, who 'never wanted anything to do with politics', is more preoccupied with family problems than with the radio news of kidnappings and murders. Nearby, Leia, Januário and their young daughter are caught up in the pleasure and security of finally finding a flat of their own, while Mena, who was once the beauty of her village, overhears her husband plotting murder.

Before dawn, these innocent people seeking to lead peaceful lives are thrown together in a vicious conspiracy to infiltrate and destabilise Mozambique. Skilfully weaving together present events and age-old traditions through narrative 'snapshots', Lília Momplé gives us, in the drama of a few short hours, an insight into the consequences of Mozambique's complex history.”

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon (US) | (UK)