This Fiction Friday, read an excerpt from Ayesha Harruna Attah’s second novel, Saturday’s Shadows.
Ayesha was born in Accra, Ghana, and educated in the United States, at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and Columbia University. She earned an MFA in creative writing from New York University in 2011.
Her first novel, Harmattan Rain, was published in 2009, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. (Read an excerpt here.) Her recently released second novel, Saturday’s Shadows, was shortlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2014.
Ayesha currently lives in Senegal, where she is studying and translating Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the oldest sources of African literature.
Read the blurb for Saturday’s Shadows:
“An evocative and bright novel where stories of family and country intersect in textured landscapes of upheaval, hope, and desire. Saturday’s Shadows is at once familiar and fresh, a compelling offering from a sensitive writer.” - NoViolet Bulawayo
Saturday’s Shadows is based in a West African country at the end of a 17 year military dictatorship. It weaves the stories of four members of the Avoka household, where everybody is lurching toward self destruction. The father, Theo, is recruited to write the memoirs of the dictator turned president whom he loathes. Zahra, matriarch of the house, rekindles an affair with an old lover and barely keeps her family and sanity together. Theo and Zahra’s son Kojo has just started the boarding school of his dreams but finds out it’s nothing like he imagined. Their new help, Atsu, recently transplanted from the village, struggles to understand the eccentricities of her new family. Saturday’s Shadows is a novel about the slow, yet unpredictable implosion of a marriage, it is also a tale of love and devotion, as well as a study in the psychology of tyrants and how their rule destroys not only their subjects but themselves.
Read the excerpt:
Excerpt from Saturday's Shadows
Book details
- Saturday’s Shadows by Ayesha Harruna Attah
EAN: 9789462380431
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