Kate’s 2¢: “Afterlives” by Abdulrazak Gurnah

“Afterlives” by Abdulrazak Gurnah

NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just

saying…

   I’m very glad Damian Lynch was reading this story. There were an awful lot of foreign words that I’d never have been able to read correctly.

   I like to read stories that feature foreign lands and cultures. I’m not sure what the point of this story was, other than to give the reader a dose of African history.

 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Abdulrazak Gurnah FRSL (born 20 December 1948) is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution.[1] His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.[1][2][3] He is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent.[4]

Early life and education[edit]

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born on 20 December 1948[5] in the Sultanate of Zanzibar.[6] He left the island, which later became part of Tanzania, at the age of 18 following the overthrow of the ruling Arab elite in the Zanzibar Revolution,[3][1] arriving in England in 1968 as a refugee. He is of Arab heritage,[7] and his father and uncle were businessmen who had immigrated from Yemen.[8] Gurnah has been quoted saying, “I came to England when these words, such as asylum-seeker, were not quite the same – more people are struggling and running from terror states.”[1][9]

He initially studied at Christ Church College, Canterbury, whose degrees were at the time awarded by the University of London.[10] He then moved to the University of Kent, where he earned his PhD with a thesis titled Criteria in the Criticism of West African Fiction,[11]

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

Afterlives DB109882

Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Reading time: 10 hours, 16 minutes.

Read by Damian Lynch.

Family

Romance

War Stories

Friendship Fiction

Historical Fiction

Historical Romance Fiction

Political Fiction

Psychological Fiction

“When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back—until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.” — Provided by publisher. Unrated. Commercial audiobook. 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Kate’s 2¢: “After the Dam” by Amy Hassinger

“After the Dam” by Amy Hassinger

NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just

saying…

   Kathy Herbst sis a good job of reading “After the Dam’ for our listening pleasure.

   I enjoyed this story, except for the ‘open ending’. Will there be a sequel?

   The theme causes the reader/listener to ponder the bigger picture of land ownership and the reality that most of us are probably bi-racial;  some combination of a blend of Caucasian, African, Native American.

from the Web:

Amy Hassinger is the author of three novels: Nina: Adolescence, The Priest’s Madonna, and After the Dam. Her writing has been translated into Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, and Indonesian and has won awards from Creative Nonfiction , Publisher’s Weekly , American Best Book Awards, the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY ..

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

After the dam DBC08254

Hassinger, Amy. Reading time: 14 hours, 37 minutes.

Read by Kathy Herbst. A production of Wisconsin Talking Book and Braille Library.

Psychological Fiction

When her grandmother, Grand, is dying, Rachel Clayborne flees with her baby from Illinois to the Clayborne family farm in Wisconsin. Tensions arise over the legacy of the land, while rachel reconnects with her past. 2016. Unrated.

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