After all, it's twelve years since Edna, their youngest, was born. But when it sinks in that a baby really is on the way, Bill is over the moon and decides that the family should move out of their two-up, two-down house in Liverpool to one with more spacious accommodation. Eileen digs her heels in at first, reluctant to leave the house she loves and friends and neighbours so dear. But a scare early in Eileen's pregnancy strengthens Bill's resolve to provide a more comfortable home for his wife. Before Eileen knows what's hit her, she's installed in a smart home with posh new neighbours. Then tragedy strikes and Eileen must come to terms with a loss far greater than leaving behind her beloved neighbourhood. She tries to put on a brave face, but she can't fool the people who love her, who miss the smile on that round, chubby face and the laughter ringing through her house. They vow to make amends and fate steps in to lend a helping hand...

    Mosheen's dream of becoming a diplomat has been shattered and Zunaira can no longer even appear on the streets of Kabul unveiled. Atiq is a jailer who guards those who have been condemned to death; the darkness of prison and the wretchedness of his job have seeped into his soul. Atiq's wife, Musarrat, is suffering from an illness no doctor can cure. Yet, the lives of these four people are about to become inexplicably intertwined, through death and imprisonment to passion and extraordinary self-sacrifice.The Swallows of Kabul is an astounding and elegiac novel of four people struggling to hold on to their humanity in a place where pleasure is a deadly sin and death has become routine.

    

     Accompanied by her chaperone, Miss Logan, Iris soon discovers a kindred spirit who shares her thirst for knowledge. As they journey from Cambridgeshire to East Africa, Iris’s eyes are opened to a world she never knew existed beyond the comforts of her family home. But when Iris meets Jeremy, she realizes in a heartbeat that they will never be compatible. He is cold and cruel, spending long periods of time on hunting expeditions and leaving Iris alone. Determined to make the best of her new life, Iris begins to adjust to her surroundings; the windswept plains of Nairobi, and the delightful sunbirds that visit her window every day. And when she meets Kamau, a school teacher, Iris finds her calling, assisting him to teach the local children English. Kamau is everything Jeremy is not. He is passionate, kind and he occupies Iris’s every thought. She must make a choice, but if she follows her heart, the price she must pay will be devastating.

    But her desperate attempts to find help elsewhere are abruptly thwarted by a new outbreak of fighting initiated by an untested government determined to win at any cost. With her husband forced into conscription, her time and options running out, she must make a fateful decision - remain where she is and jeopardize the life of one child, or flee her beloved homeland, leaving her husband and second daughter behind... possibly forever. Relentless is the powerful and inspiring story of an Eritrean woman who faced incredible obstacles, defied a ruthless regime, and became an American immigrant success story, all while never giving up fighting for the only thing that really ever mattered: family. "There is a proverb in my native Tigrinya language,both warning and admonishment.It goes like this:Haki tseraba mot keraba.It means, if you speak the truth, you will gather many enemies." The Dreams of Freedom stories One family, two powerful accounts of love, heartbreak, and determination from one of the world's most isolated and abusive governments in modern history. It's 1991, and a bloody thirty-year conflict with Ethiopia has just ended, earning Eritrea its first taste of freedom in over a century. But peace is a delicate flower, and power is all-too easily corrupting. Soon, the small Horn-of-African nation will find itself at war once again, back in the familiar stranglehold of despotism, except this time it will be at the hands of its own beloved leader and war hero. Families are torn apart, suspicion and desperation grow. Human rights are violated. In the midst of worsening oppression, one man and one woman will risk everything to save their children from this life of violence and give them the future they once imagined for themselves.. ~ Relentless - An Immigrant Story by Wudasi Nayzgi and Kenneth James Howe ~ I Will Not Grow Downward - Memoir Of An Eritrean Refugee by Yikealo Neab and Kenneth James Howe I WILL NOT GROW DOWNWARD - MEMOIR OF AN ERITREAN REFUGEE ONE MAN'S LONG AND PERILOUS FLIGHT FROM AFRICA'S HERMIT KINGDOMTHIRTY YEARS OF BLOODY CONFLICT with a powerful enemy never broke the spirit of the Eritrean people. After winning their freedom from Ethiopia, a young man dreams of starting a new life, building a home, and teaching his children what it means to be the masters of their own fate. But all-too soon, the fighting resumes. Rounded up and forced into conscription, subjected to inhumane treatment, made to serve a despotic leader in an army fighting a war nobody wants, he will have to sacrifice much just for a chance to get back what he lost - his family, his freedom, his birthright. But will it be worth it? Or will he simply lose everything in the end? I Will Not Grow Downward offers an exceedingly rare glimpse inside the highly secretive and brutally repressive regime known as Africa's North Korea.

    A dual narrative set in contemporary London and 18th century Benin in Africa, the book traverses the realms of magic realism with luminous style and graceful, effortless prose.

    Amabelle Desir, Haitian-born and a faithful maidservant to the Dominican family that took her in when she was orphaned, and her lover Sebastien, an itinerant sugarcane cutter, decide they will marry and return to Haiti at the end of the cane season. However, hostilities toward Haitian laborers find a vitriolic spokesman in the ultra-nationalist Generalissimo Trujillo who calls for an ethnic cleansing of his Spanish-speaking country. As rumors of Haitian persecution become fact, as anxiety turns to terror, Amabelle and Sebastien's dreams are leveled to the most basic human desire: to endure. Based on a little-known historical event, this extraordinarily moving novel memorializes the forgotten victims of nationalist madness and the deeply felt passion and grief of its survivors.

    Set on the Eastern Front of WWI, on a cruel and unforgiving mountain, and later in a terrifying German prison camp, this fascinating story encapsulates real men and their struggles to survive a war unlike the world has ever seen. Both soldiers have their own stories to tell.They are “SERGEI AND HANS”.

    In the south of the island lies Port Victoria, dominated by the Governor’s palatial mansion; in the north, a settlement of mud huts shelter a hundred thousand natives; and in dense jungle live the notorious Maula tribe, kept under surveillance by a solitary District Officer and his young wife. When Chief-designate, Dinamaula, returns from his studies in England with a spirited desire to speed the development of his people, political crisis erupts into a ferment of intrigue and violence.

    Tierno Monenembo's The King of Kahel was originally published in France in 2008 and was the winner of the French literary prize, the prix Renaudot, which is awarded to the author of an outstanding original novel.  Loosely based on the life of Olivier de Sanderval, a man who journeyed to Guinea to build an empire by conquering the hostile region of Fouta Djallon, the book exposes how Sanderval braves all dangers to build a railway that will bring modern civilization to Africa.

    As the years passed, the two grew closer, swapping stories about coloureds and zulus, life in Riverlea and Soweto, pass laws, politics and falling in love.

    In both it is ultimately the women who suffer, whether, paradoxically, from a surfeit of feasting and family life in India, or from self-denial and starvation in the US. or both. Uma, the plain, older daughter still lives at home, frustrated in her attempts to escape and make a life for herself. Her Indian family is difficult , demanding but mostly, good hearted. Despite her disappointments, Uma comes through as the survivor, avoiding an unfulfilling marriage, liek her sister's or a suicidal one, like that arranged for her pretty cousin. And in America, where young Arun goes as a student, men in the suburbs char hunks of bleeding meat while the women don't appear to cook or eat at all - seems bewildering and terriying to the young Indian adolescent far from home.

    A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events—the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement—and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

    His new novel, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award, is a clear-eyed, witty, yet deeply serious look at South Africa's political history and its damaging legacy in the lives of those who live there.The last time Silas Ali encountered Lieutenant Du Boise, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the lieutenant was conducting a vicious assault on Silas's wife, Lydia, in revenge for her husband's participation in Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. When Silas sees Du Boise by chance twenty years later, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is about to deliver its report, crimes from the past erupt into the present, splintering the Alis' fragile peace. Meanwhile Silas and Lydia's son, Mikey, a thoroughly contemporary young hip-hop lothario, contends in unforeseen ways with his parents' pasts.A harrowing story of a brittle family on the crossroads of history and a fearless skewering of the pieties of revolutionary movements, Bitter Fruit is a cautionary tale of how we do, or do not, address the past's deepest wounds.

    Petina Gappah’s characters may have ordinary hopes and dreams, but they are living in a world where a loaf of bread costs half a million dollars, where wives can’t trust even their husbands for fear of AIDS, and where people know exactly what will be printed in the one and only daily newspaper because the news is always, always good.In her spirited debut collection, the Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah brings us the resilience and inventiveness of the people who struggle to live under Robert Mugabe’s regime. She takes us across the city of Harare, from the townships beset by power cuts to the manicured lawns of privilege and corruption, where wealthy husbands keep their first wives in the “big houses” while their unofficial second wives wait in the “small houses,” hoping for a promotion.Despite their circumstances, the characters in An Elegy for Easterly are more than victims—they are all too human, with as much capacity to inflict pain as to endure it. They struggle with the larger issues common to all people everywhere: failed promises, unfulfilled dreams, and the yearning for something to anchor them to life.At the sound of the last post --An elegy for Easterly --The annex shuffle --Something nice from London --In the heart of the Golden Triangle --The Mupandawana dancing champion --Our man in Geneva wins a million euros --The maid from Lalapanzi --Aunt Juliana's Indian --The cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom --My cousin-sister Rambanai --The negotiated settlement --Midnight at the Hotel California