Aminatta Forna was a judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2004 and her memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water was a BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' and runner-up for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2003 For fans of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Arundhati Roy and Amy Tan Her most recent novel Ancestor Stones was published in several languages, was nominated for the International IMPAC Award and was selected by the Washington Post as one of the most important books of 2006
Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland and raised in West Africa. Her first book The Devil that Danced on the Water was runner-up for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2003. Her novel Ancestor Stones was winner of the 2008 Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany, was nominated for the International IMPAC Award and selected by the Washington Post as one of the most important books of 2006. In 2007 Vanity Fair named Aminatta as one of Africa's most promising new writers. Aminatta has also written for magazines and newspapers, radio and television, and presented television documentaries on Africa's history and art. Aminatta Forna lives in London with her husband.
Forna's second novel after her well-regarded memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, takes place in Sierra Leone and weaves stories, past and present, involving Kai, a young surgeon; Elias, an older patient; and Adrian, a British psychiatrist. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Delivering us to a common centre, no matter where we happen to have been born, Aminatta Forna tackles those great human experiences of love and war, of friendship, rivalry, of death and triumphant survival. Often darkly funny, written with gritty realism and tenderness, The Memory of Love is a profoundly affecting work' Kiran Desai, author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss 'A subtle and complex exploration, daring in depth and scope, of both the psyche of a war-torn African state and the attractions which it holds for an outsider. Forna is a writer of great talent who does not shy from tackling the toughest questions about why humans do the things they do: from the smallest act of betrayal to the greatest acts of love' Monica Ali 'A writer of startling talent' Daily Telegraph
Forma, recipient of a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Ancestor Stones, returns to Africa's troubled conscience in this admirable if uneven outing. Adrian Lockheart is a well-meaning English psychologist who embarks on a temporary post at a Sierra Leone hospital intending to modernize treatment of the long-neglected schizophrenics, transients, and scarred victims of civil war who walk the hospital grounds. He soon meets his match in the elderly ex-professor Elias Cole, who speaks eloquently of his country's turbulent history-and also of his passion for the wife of a more radically minded colleague whose eventual disappearance Cole may be implicated in. As the holes in Elias's story widen, Adrian falls for a patient's daughter and into conflict with a surgeon, and ripples from the unexamined past threaten the present. Yet Forma's material doesn't measure up to the book's length. The book's prolixity, combined with scenes that drag or come off as forced, certainly doesn't ruin the experience, but it does occasionally glut what amounts to a heartening cry for moral responsibility in the thick of maddening injustice. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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