Dreams in a Time of War - Rilegato

Wa Thiong'o, Ngugi

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1846553776 ISBN 13: 9781846553776

Casa editrice: Harvill Secker, 2010

Riassunto

In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngugi wa Thiong'o paints a mesmerising portrait of a young boy's experiences in an African nation in flux.

Beginning in the late 1930s, this moving and entertaining memoir describes Ngugi's day-to-day life as the fifth child of his father's third wife in a family that included twenty-four children born to four different mothers. Against the backdrop of World War II, which affected the lives of Africans under British colonial rule in unexpected ways, Ngugi spent his childhood as the apple of his mother's eye before attending school to slake what was then considered a bizarre thirst for learning.

As he grows up, the wider political and social changes occurring in Kenya at this time begin to impinge on the boy's life in both inspiring and frightening ways. Through telling the story of his grandparents and parents and of his brothers' involvement on different sides of the violent Mau Mau uprising, Ngugi wa Thiong'o takes us back to a momentous period in Kenyan history, deftly etching a bygone era, capturing the landscape, the people and their culture, and the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war.

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN's Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers' freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

In his crowded career and his eventful life, Ngugi has enacted, for all to see, the paradigmatic trials and quandaries of a contemporary African writer caught in sometimes implacable political, social, racial, and linguistic currents (John Updike The New Yorker)

Descrizione del libro:

A powerful memoir of an extraordinary Kenyan childhood by an international literary giant

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Harvill Secker
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1846553776
• ISBN 13: 9781846553776
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 272