Africa, English, Expat Stories and Experiences, North America

Always Another Country

Author: Sisonke Msimang

Language: English

Summary: “Brutally and uncompromisingly honest, Sisonke’s beautifully crafted storytelling enriches the already extraordinary pool of young African women writers of our time.” ―Graça Machel, widow of former South African president Nelson Mandela

Born in exile, in Zambia, to a guerrilla father and a working mother, Sisonke Msimang is constantly on the move. Her parents, talented and highly educated, travel from Zambia to Kenya and Canada and beyond with their young family. Always the outsider, and against a backdrop of racism and xenophobia, Sisonke develops her keenly perceptive view of the world. In this sparkling account of a young girl’s path to womanhood, Sisonke interweaves her personal story with her political awakening in America and Africa, her euphoria at returning to the new South Africa, and her disillusionment with the new elites. Confidential and reflective, Always Another Country is a search for belonging and identity: a warm and intimate story that will move many readers.

Sisonke Msimang is one of the most exciting contemporary female black voices in literature. Now based in Perth, Australia, she regularly contributes to publications like The Guardian, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times. She has over 20,000 followers on Twitter @Sisonkemsimang. Her TED Talk,“If a story moves you, act on it,” has been viewed over 1.3 million times. (Goodreads)

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annacereti26 June 20209 June 2020Leave a comment

Africa, English, Expat Stories and Experiences

In the Shadow of Man

Author: Jane Goodall

Language: English

Summary:

World-renowned primatologist, conservationist, and humanitarian Dr. Jane Goodall’s account of her life among the wild chimpanzees of Gombe is one of the most enthralling stories of animal behavior ever written.

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annacereti10 January 20207 May 2020Leave a comment

Africa, Italiano, New Cultures

Lamiere

Author: Danilo Deninotti, Giorgio Fontana, Lucio Ruvidotti Language: Italian Summary: La classica immagine del Kenya è quella di un paradiso, il luogo ideale per una vacanza. Ma dentro questo sogno c’è un incubo. A Nairobi, la capitale, oltre metà della popolazione è concentrata nelle baraccopoli e vive in condizioni estreme di miseria e abbandono. Al di sotto della dignità umana. Deninotti, Fontana e Ruvidotti hanno fatto … Continue reading Lamiere

aleexpat13 February 20192 March 2019Leave a comment

Africa, English, Expat Stories and Experiences

Circling the sun

Author: Paula McLain

Language: English

Summary: Set in 1920s colonial Kenya, Circling the Sun is about an unforgettable woman who lives by nobody’s rules but her own. She was a daughter of Edwardian England, transplanted to Kenya as a young girl by parents who dreamed of life on an African farm. But by the time Beryl Markham was sixteen, that dream had fallen apart. Catapulted into a disastrous marriage, she emerged from its wreckage with one idea: to take charge of her own destiny. – Source: ExpatNest

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claudialandini6 October 201716 October 2019Leave a comment

Africa, English, Reviews

Rules of the wild, a beautiful novel on Africa

Rules of the wild is Francesca Marciano’s first novel. It is a pity this book is no longer in print, because despite having been written almost twenty years ago, I believe it talks about Africa in a way that still applies today. Especially when it comes to describe the white community’s moods and dynamics, and what it means to find one’s place as a white foreign person … Continue reading Rules of the wild, a beautiful novel on Africa

claudialandini10 May 201728 April 2017Leave a comment

Africa, English, Expat Stories and Experiences, Italiano

Rules of the wild

Author: Francesca Marciano

Language: English

Summary: A mesmerizing novel of love and nostalgia set in the vast spaces of contemporary East Africa.
Romantic, often resonantly ironic, moving and wise, Rules of the Wild transports us to a landscape of unsurpassed beauty even as it gives us a sharp-eyed portrait of a closely knit tribe of cultural outsiders: the expatriates living in Kenya today. Challenged by race, by class, and by a longing for home, here are “safari boys” and samaritans, reporters bent on their own fame, travelers who care deeply about elephants but not at all about the people of Africa. They all know each other. They meet at dinner parties, they sleep with each other, they argue about politics and the best way to negotiate their existence in a place where they don’t really belong. At the center is Esmé, a beautiful young woman of dazzling ironies and introspections, who tells us her story in a voice both passionate and self-deprecating. Against a paradoxical backdrop of limitless physical freedom and escalating civil unrest, Esmé struggles to make sense of her own place in Africa and of her feelings for the two men there whom she loves–Adam, a second-generation Kenyan who is the first to show her the wonders of her adopted land, and Hunter, a British journalist sickened by its horrors. – Source: Amazon.com

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