Book picks similar to
Moses and the Movie by Barbara Kimenye


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American Spy


Lauren Wilkinson - 2019
    She's brilliant, but she's also a young black woman working in an old boys' club. Her career has stalled out, she's overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she's given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic, revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes. Yes, even though she secretly admires the work Thomas is doing for his country. Yes, even though she is still grieving over the mysterious death of her sister, whose example led Marie to this career path in the first place. Yes, even though a furious part of her suspects she's being offered the job because of her appearance and not her talent.In the year that follows, Marie will observe Thomas, seduce him, and ultimately have a hand in the coup that will bring him down. But doing so will change everything she believes about what it means to be a spy, a lover, a sister, and a good American.Inspired by true events -- Thomas Sankara is known as “Africa's Che Guevara” -- this novel knits together a gripping spy thriller, a heartbreaking family drama, and a passionate romance. This is a face of the Cold War you've never seen before, and it introduces a powerful new literary voice.

I Too Had a Love Story: Part 1 (Penguin Petit)


Ravinder Singh - 2018
    Yet, only a few lucky ones get to experience it in their lives. If the beginning of Ravin and Khushi's journey is anything to go by, their story is bound to be anything but conventional. However, if they have been lucky enough to find true love in each other, will they have the strength to deal with the biggest challenge life throws their way?It has been three years since Ravin graduated from engineering college and, slowly but surely, he is beginning to get his ducks in a row. He has a decent job, a stable salary, and has his eyes set on an MBA. Is this a good time to start thinking about 'settling down'? How does one even find love?Read on to see how Ravin goes about finding the answers to his questions in the first part of Ravinder Singh's powerful love story, I Too Had a Love Story.

The 20-Month Legend: My Baby Boy's Fight with Cancer


Steve Tate - 2018
    The once-star collegiate football player finds himself fighting for his son’s life. This memoir takes you through the various challenges of raising a family of six kids and balancing a career, all while his son battles to defeat the odds of survival. Both Steve and his high school sweetheart, Savanna, found hope and happiness through the example of their 20-month-old son Hayes.

Reggie and Me


James Hendry - 2020
    But for a one small boy in the leafy northern suburbs of Johannesburg ... his beloved housekeeper is serving fish fingers for lunch.This is the tale of Hamish Charles Sutherland Fraser – chorister, horse rider, schoolboy actor and, in his dreams, 1st XV rugby star and young ladies’ delight. A boy who climbs trees in the spring and who loves a girl named Reggie.An odd child growing up in a conflicted, scary, beautiful society.A young South African who hasn’t learnt the rules.

Sleeping With The Enemy


Colin Falconer - 2017
    This is one of those books. From internationally bestselling author, Colin Falconer. Palestine 1933. Sarah Landauer and Rishou Hass’an are divided by the barbed wire of the kibbutz and by the religions of their ancestors. For them even to meet is strictly forbidden – yet somehow, they fall in love. As tensions rise, Sarah is recruited into the Haganah, the outlawed Jewish intelligence service; Rishou goes to Jerusalem, trying to stay out of a war he does not believe in. But as the country descends into chaos, they find themselves the most reluctant of enemies. Then the British leave for good, and they and their families are faced with danger and violence on every side. Sarah and Rishou keep their secret, living two irreconcilable lives. But as the Jews and Arabs prepare for the final battle, they must face a final, agonizing destiny; forced to choose between their love for each other and loyalty and duty to their own people. What is the right choice?

Exclusive Chapter Sampler: A Year of Marvellous Ways


Sarah Winman - 2015
     From the author of the bestselling WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT comes this spellbinding new novel. Marvellous Ways is eighty-nine years old and has lived alone in a remote Cornish creek for nearly all her life. Lately she's taken to spending her days sitting by the river with a telescope. She's waiting for something - she's not sure what, but she'll know it when she sees it. Drake is a young soldier left reeling by the Second World War. When his promise to fulfil a dying man's last wish sees him wash up in Marvellous' creek, broken in body and spirit, the old woman comes to his aid. A Year of Marvellous Ways is a glorious, life-affirming story about the magic in everyday life and the pull of the sea, the healing powers of storytelling and sloe gin, love and death and how we carry on when grief comes snapping at our heels.

The Best of Friends: Two Women, Two Continents, and One Enduring Friendship


Sara James - 2007
    As a local television anchor, Sara James paid her own way to cover the war in Nicaragua, a gamble that later propelled her to NBC. At the network, James exposed slavery in Sudan and plunged to the gravesite of the Titanic, but struggled to balance her demanding career with marriage and motherhood.Though the two lead seemingly opposite lives, there is much they share: a hometown in Richmond, Virginia, an attraction to life on the razor's edge, a weakness for men with foreign passports and accents, and a past. Now, in their heartfelt memoir, Mauney and James alternately narrate the story of how, they, two women separated by thousands of miles, have found themselves bound together through temperament, circumstance, and serendipity. The Best of Friends uses the example of their lives to explore such universal questions as: When your heart is broken, how do you heal? How do you realize your dreams without compromising yourself? How do you tame ambition to make room for love and family? And what does it mean as an adult to be a "best" friend?The Best of Friends is James and Mauney's story, but it is also the story of so many women in their twenties, thirties, and forties who, with the help of friends, dared to reinvent their lives just when it seemed that everything was falling apart.

Tomorrow Died Yesterday


Chimeka Garricks - 2011
    Douye aka Doughboy the career militant responsible for the crime. Amaibi the gentle university professor / eco-warrior accused. Kaniye the lawyer turned restaurateur who tries to get him off and Tubo an amoral oil company executive. Against a backdrop of corrupt practises, failed systems and injustice, these four friends tell the story of oil in a region and its effects on local communities and the Nigerian larger society.Chimeka Garricks in his extraordinary debut novel has written a frank and moving story about the realities of contemporary Nigeria. The evil long term effects of military rule resulting in the fragmentation and break down of moral values. His story paints a realistic picture of the very high price corruption exacts on a society and how no one is immune from its consequences.Chimeka has written a remarkable book; honest, insightful and tragic – Jude Dibia author of Blackbird.The book is absolute genius. Well researched, crisp lines, excellent and vivid dialogue, well developed characters. - Jekwu Ozoemene, author of The Anger of Unfulfillment.Tomorrow Died Yesterday is a chronicle of a region in turmoil, of a generation caught between the expectations of their parents and the depreciations of the Nigerian situation, each of these four men navigate their issues in different ways, and in their own voices. Mr Garricks is a new literary voice; unheralded, fresh, honest, unshorn of superficial flourish. Well worth the read. – Eghosa Imasuen, author of Fine Boys.Tomorrow Died Yesterday is a story of action and consequence, lies and love, greed and lust, the power of the truth and most poignantly, redemption. In a John Grisham-esque storytelling style, Chimeka Garricks carries the reader from the present to the past and back again in a seamless blend of storytelling, from the swamps of the Niger Delta to its courtrooms with some action, humour, suspense and just the right amount of romance thrown in. Tomorrow Died Yesterday is a novel by a Nigerian about Nigeria for the entire world. All in all, it is an impressive debut for a writer. - Seun Odukoya, reviewer www.naijastories.com

The Other Americans


Laila Lalami - 2019
    The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow, Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora's and an Iraq War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself.As the characters--deeply divided by race, religion, and class--tell their stories, connections among them emerge, even as Driss's family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love, messy and unpredictable, is born.

The Mother Garden


Robin Romm - 2007
    In fresh and irreverent prose, Romm captures the mo-ments before and after loss, mining the depths of grief with wit and grace.The stories in "The Mother Garden" are at once vividly realistic and infused with the bizarre -- a man uses a chicken egg to test whether he is ready for fatherhood; a daughter plants a garden of mothers to replace her own; a family's ghosts literally fall through the ceiling, disrupting daily life; a woman finds her father sleeping in the desert after twenty-six years of living without him. People stumble in relationships, start families, struggle with illness, learn to mourn -- and as in life, these acts are consuming, magical, and disorienting.Sharply funny and deeply moving, this extraordinary collection introduces a young writer of fierce originality and prodigious talent.

The Breadmakers Saga


Margaret Thomson Davis - 1993
    This volume contains the novels 'The Breadmakers', 'A Baby Might Be Crying' and 'A Sort of Peace'.The breadmakers. Originally published: London : Allison & Busby, 1972 --A baby might be crying. Originally published: London : Allison & Busby, 1973 --A sort of peace. Originally published: London : Allison & Busby, 1973.

The Spider King's Daughter


Chibundu Onuzo - 2012
    She lives in a sprawling mansion in Lagos, protected by armed guards and ferried everywhere in a huge black jeep.A world away from Abike's mansion, in the city's slums, lives an eighteen-year-old hawker struggling to make sense of the world. His family lost everything after his father's death and now he sells ice cream at the side of the road to support his mother and sister.When Abike buys ice cream from the hawker one afternoon, they strike up a tentative and unlikely romance. But as they grow closer, revelations from the past threaten their relationship and both Abike and the hawker must decide where their loyalties lie.

Kamby Bolongo Mean River


Robert Lopez - 2009
    His only link to the outside world is a telephone that will not dial out. During the occasional calls he receives, usually wrong numbers, the narrator remembers his former life growing up in Injury, Alaska with his Mother, an often unemployed single parent, and his older brother, Charlie, a sometime boxer, sometime actor. Throughout the course of this extraordinary novel, the unwilling captive draws his life-story in stickfigures on the walls. From the difficulty of his birth, to his sickly childhood, to adventures with his brother, the narrator depicts his crazy life, which is at once fascinating and heartbreaking. The one memory that haunts him is that of watching a movie about slaves on television and how that one slave, the one for whom Kamby Bolongo Mean River meant freedom, would never relinquish the idea of returning home.

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives


Lola Shoneyin - 2010
    The struggles, rivalries, intricate family politics, and the interplay of personalities and relationships within the complex private world of a polygamous union come to life in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives—Big Love and The 19th Wife set against a contemporary African background.

Hideous Kinky


Esther Freud - 1992
    When her mother decides to take her and her sister away from life as they know it and move to Morocco, a five-year-old English school girl embarks on an adventure-filled romp through northern Africa.