TWENTY YEARS OF THE CAINE PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING

Name: TWENTY YEARS OF THE CAINE PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING
Author: The Caine Prize Committee
ISBN: 978-1-62371-935-7

by The Caine Prize Committee ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 23, 2020

Essential for students of contemporary world literature.

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Best-of gathering of stories from the first two decades of the distinguished literary award devoted to African letters.

In his introduction, Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri writes that the Caine Prize for African Writing “has turned out to be a regenerator of African literature,” a literature that experienced a boom in the immediate post-colonial era but is less well known today. The mostly young writers represented in the collection have, he continues, delivered “tales political, tales harrowing, tales humorous, tales told with vitality and passion and intelligence.” All that is abundantly evident in the editors’ choices. The inaugural piece, by the Egyptian writer Leila Aboulela, mirrors her own life as an immigrant to Scotland. Shadia, a young woman, has fallen behind in a statistics class and asks a Scottish classmate for his notes: “Her ignorance and the impending exams were horrors she wanted to escape,” Aboulela writes, but at the price of striking up a conversation with a man who has a disagreeable ponytail and earring: “The whole of him was pathetic,” she sniffs, and even when the young man, barely comprehensible because of his accent, expresses an interest in Islam (“Ah wouldnae mind travelling to Mecca), she can find no bridge to him. Other pieces speak to the difficulty of crossing cultures, the Nigerian writer Rotimi Babatunde’s “Bombay’s Republic” being a sidelong case in point: A Nigerian soldier finds himself fighting the Japanese in Burma, save that the enemy has vanished because the British have put out the word that “the Africans are coming and that they eat people,” a calumny that demands a response—and finds one when he returns to his homeland. All the stories are excellent, but some are especially memorable, among them Henrietta Rose-Innes’ “Poison,” the 2008 winner, which presciently speaks of an environmental apocalypse that finds the sun over Cape Town “a pink bleached disk, like the moon of a different planet.”

Essential for students of contemporary world literature.

Pub Date: March 23, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-62371-935-7

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Interlink

Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.