Out of Africa
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Starring Reese Witherspoon as a Kansas City employment counselor tasked with helping three brothers, refugees from war-torn Sudan, resettle in America and find work. She helps the young men search for their sister, who was sent to a host family in a different state.
A fatherless boy in an unnamed West African country is recruited by a charismatic commander to join a group of guerrilla fighters as they murder and pillage the countryside. Desperate for a father figure and a family of any kind, he finds himself committing acts of depravity of the sort that destroyed his own family. Adapted for the screen in 2015, starring Idris Elba (Luther; Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom)
A war zone reporter, Badkhen embedded herself in a family of Fulani cow herders, who walk their herds through pastures stretching across Saharan grasslands as they have done for millennia. The Fulani adapt to changing realities and adopt modern tools to their traditional nomadic lives, and welcome the Russian-born journalist into the fold. Badkhen’s narrative moves in the same slow, gentle rhythm of the group’s migration.
Nobel nominee, human rights activist, lawyer, and the first female gynecologist in her homeland of Somalia, Hawa’s memoir spans her nation’s emergence from colonialism into warlord feudalism, her own experience as a child bride, to medical student, to founder of a rural hospital-turned-refugee camp. After being captured by insurgents who destroy her hospital, she not only persuades them to release her, but demands (and receives) a written apology.
Ruxin, a public health activist running the Millennium Village Project in Rwanda, is charged with bringing health care and modern farming techniques to rural villages recovering from civil war and genocide. His wife opens a restaurant called “Heaven,” training local residents and using local products to create a gourmet menu and sustainable employment.
Ikechukwu "Ike" Uzondu holds a degree in economics but works as a New York City cab driver. Mired in debt, unable to help the sister he left in Nigeria, he hatches a plan to steal his ancestral village’s statue of their protective war god and sell it to an antiquities dealer. Cultural, religious and class conflicts are handled with the author’s bitter humor.
From the multiple literary award-winning author of How to Read the Air (2010,) comes a story set in the turbulent 1970’s about the relationships two people on different continents and very different living conditions have with Isaac, a former Ugandan revolutionary who becomes a refugee in a Midwestern farm town.
Kennedy Odede grew up in the enormous slum of Kibera in Kenya. Jessica Posner was a Wesleyan University theater student taking a semester abroad, in Nairobi, working as a volunteer at Odede’s Shining Hope for Communities theater group. The couple returns to the United States to finish college, and begin planning a school for the girls of Kibera.
Boyd Varty’s family have made the Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa their home for four generations. Varty recounts his family’s work to rehabilitate an abandoned, depleted ranch into a world-class wildlife preserve, and the personal changes wrought by the social awakening of the anti-Apartheid movement.
The author of A Long Way Gone, the memoir of his life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, brings us his first novel, about the return of the surviving residents of the village of Imperi. After a decade of war, they must reinvent themselves and their town, rebuild their lives, and reweave the fabric of their shared future.
Teenage sweethearts in Nigeria embark on separate lives on different continents; Ifemelu’s journey takes her to American college campuses and success with her social commentary blog, Obinze makes his way to London and must navigate life as an illegal immigrant. Both experience culture shock and dissatisfaction with Western life on their way back to their homeland and each other.
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