Book picks similar to
Pictures of a Dying Man by Agymah Kamau
barbados
reading-the-world
caribbean
a-year-of-reading-the-world
How to Make Love to a Negro
Dany Laferrière - 1985
With raunchy humor and a working-class intellectualism, Laferrière’s narrator wanders the slums of Montreal, has sex with white women, and writes a book to save his life.With this novel, Laferrière began a series of internationally acclaimed social and political novels about the love of the world, and the world of sex, including Heading South and I Am a Japanese Writer.novel, Canada/Haiti, tr David Homel
Pouliuli
Albert Wendt - 1977
What happens when an old man wakes up one morning and finds that everything around him now fills with revulsion? What happens when Faleasa Osovae, the highest ranking alii in the village of Maalaelua, feigns madness and throws away his responsibilities as a chief?Albert Wendt is a Samoan, this novel plays in Samoa and gives a good feel for the Samoan way of life and gives also an idea how New Zealand affected it.
Rooftops of Tehran
Mahbod Seraji - 2009
In this poignant, eye-opening and emotionally vivid novel, Mahbod 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...
The House of Bilqis: A Novel
Azhar Abidi - 2008
Though Samad attempts to persuade his mother to join them in Australia, she insists on remaining in Karachi even while Pakistan is facing turmoil. It's 1985. The mullahs and the generals are in control, and an insurgency is beginning in Kashmir. Meanwhile, Bilqis's servant girl, Mumtaz, enters a relationship with Omar, a young man caring for a neighboring house. Omar is an intense man who resents Pakistan's class system, and his frustration leads him to the freedom movement in Kashmir. But Mumtaz is in love and willing to sacrifice her honor to be with him. The intertwining stories of Bilqis, Samad, and Mumtaz offer a powerful and nuanced portrait of Pakistan in the modern era-a place of conflicting loyalties, rich with history and culture, and plagued by violence. Abidi's precise and elegant prose illuminates the struggle between a mother and son to reconcile their love for each other with their love for home.
A Cowrie of Hope
Binwell Sinyangwe - 2000
In A Cowrie of Hope Binwell Sinyangwe captures the rhythms of a people whose poverty has not diminished their dignity, where hope can only be accompanied by small acts of courage, and where friendship has not lost its value.
Johnny Mad Dog
Emmanuel Dongala - 2002
Laokol�, at the same age, simply wants to finish high school. Together, they narrate a crossing of paths that has explosive results. Set amid the chaos of West Africa's civil wars, and acclaimed by such writers as Philip Roth and Chinua Achebe, Emmanuel Dongala's powerful, exuberant, and terrifying new work is a coming-of-age story like no other.
Mennonites Don't Dance
Darcie Friesen Hossack - 2010
Darcie Friesen Hossack's stories in Mennonites Don't Dance offer an honest, detailed look into the experiences of children - both young and adult - and their parents and grandparents, exploring generational ties, sins, penance, and redemption. Taking place primarily on the Canadian prairies, the families in these stories are confronted by the conflict between tradition and change. One story sees a daughter-in-law's urban ideals push and pull against a mother's simple, rural, ways. In another, a daughter raised in the Mennonite tradition tries to break free from her upbringing to escape to the city in search of a better life.
The Desert and the Drum
Mbarek Ould Beyrouk - 2015
It won the Ahmadou-Kourouma Prize in 2016.Everything changes for Rayhana when foreigners with strange machines arrive to mine for metal near her Bedouin camp. One of them is the enigmatic Yahya. Rayhana’s association with him leads to her abandoning all she knows and fleeing alone to the city. When her tribe discover she’s stolen their sacred drum they pursue her to exact their revenge. Though Rayhana has her own missing person to seek.The Desert and the Drum tells of Rayhana’s rift with her family, the disturbing characters she encounters in the metropolis, her attempts to separate friend from foe and to find a place for herself amidst the contradictions of contemporary Mauritania.
In the Shadow of the Banyan
Vaddey Ratner - 2012
Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labor, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author's extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyan is testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience.
The Free Negress Elisabeth
Cynthia McLeod - 2000
Challenging the prevailing racial stereotypes by demonstrating her intelligence and business acumen, she is determined to marry a white man in defiance of all established norms and conventions. Set amidst the rich backdrop of the Golden Age of Suriname, this biographical account depicts the complex social and racial stratifications which were features of slave colonies of the era as well as this remarkable woman who overcame institutionalized discrimination and prejudice to become one of the wealthiest individuals in the slave colony of Dutch Guyana.
Wave of Terror
Theodore Odrach - 2008
Ivan Kulik has just become Headmaster of school number 7 in Hlaby, a rural village in the Pinsk Marshes. Through his eyes we witness the tragedy of Stalinist domination where people are randomly deported to labour camps or tortured in Zovty Prison in Pinsk. The author's individual gift that sets him apart from his contemporaries is the range of his sympathies and his unromantic, unsentimental approach to the sensual lives of females. His debt to Chekhov is obvious in his ability to capture the internal drama of his characters with psychological concision.
Baho!
Roland Rugero - 2012
To the young woman's community, his fleeing confirms his guilt, setting off a chain reaction of pursuit, mob justice, and Nyamugari's attempts at explanation. Young Burundian novelist Roland Rugero's second novel Baho!, the first Burundian novel to ever be translated into English, explores the concepts of miscommunication and justice against the backdrop of war-torn Burundi's beautiful green hillsides.
Perfidious Albion
Sam Byers - 2018
Brexit has happened and is real. Fear and loathing are on the rise. Grass-roots right-wing political party England Always are fomenting hatred. The residents of a failing housing estate are being cleared from their homes. A multinational tech company is making inroads into the infrastructure. Just as the climate seems at its most pressured, masked men begin a series of ‘disruptions’, threatening to make internet histories public, asking the townspeople what don’t you want to share? As tensions mount, lives begin to unravel.Jess Ellis’s research into internet misogyny pushes her relationship with her over-exposed opinion columnist boyfriend Robert Townsend to breaking point. Robert’s championing of the inhabitants of the threatened estate begins to erode the edges of his fragile idealism. Local England Always politician Hugo Bennington finds his twisted loyalties catching up with him. At the nearby tech park, behind the utopian rhetoric, Trina James finds that something is dangerously amiss.A controversial tweet; a series of ill-judged thinkpieces; a riot of opinions. Suddenly Edmundsbury is no longer the peaceful town it has always imagined itself to be. Things are changing. No-one is quite who they appear. The future has arrived, and it is not what anyone imagined.
طوبا و معنای شب
شهرنوش پارسیپور - 1990
The Iranian best-selling author of eleven books, including Women Without Men, Shahrnush Parsipur now lives in exile in the United States.