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"'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to the...
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English
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[Lasell] Memoirs
Dedham's Black History Month - Adult
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Hollywood Stars
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Dedham's Black History Month - Adult
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Hollywood Stars
More Lists...
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"The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of one man's coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed,"--Amazon.com.
Noah's path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at the time such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As he struggles to find himself in a...
Author
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Pub. Date
[2024]
Language
English
Description
Ivan has been happily living in a wildlife sanctuary, with his friend Ruby next door in the elephant enclosure, frequent visits from his canine friend Bob, and his mate Kinyani by his side. And in the happiest turn of all, Ivan and Kinyani have welcomed a set of twins to their family!
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This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith's widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to ₃help people with problems in their lives.₄ Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that...
5) Swing time
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English
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"An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty. Two brown girls dream of being dancers--but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties,...
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Language
English
Description
"Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. In a sweeping narrative that traverses 600 years, one that eloquently weaves precise historical detail with poignant personal reportage, Pulitzer Prize finalist Howard W. French retells the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe,...
Author
Publisher
Candlewick Press
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"A Nigerian storyteller explores the continent of Africa country by country: its geography, peoples, animals, history, resources, and cultural diversity. The book is divided into five distinct sections--South, East, West, Central, and North--and each country is showcased on its own bright, energetic page brimming with friendly facts on science, industry, food, sports, music, wildlife, landscape features, even snippets of local languages"--
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Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s. The book is written with such keen empathy and understanding that to read it is to share fully in the gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the dignity of mankind. Cry, the Beloved Country...
Author
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English
Description
Graham Greene's masterpiece The Heart of the Matter tells the story of a good man enmeshed in love, intrigue, and evil in a West African coastal town. Scobie is bound by strict integrity to his role as assistant police commissioner and by severe responsibility to his wife, Louise, for whom he cares with a fatal pity. When Scobie falls in love with the young widow Helen, he finds vital passion again yielding to pity, integrity giving way to deceit...
11) Paradise
Author
Language
English
Description
The adventures of a 12-year-old African boy sold into slavery by his father to pay off a debt. The setting is East Africa, a place of trade caravans, tribal warfare and the beginnings of European colonization.
12) The promise
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English
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"A modern saga that could only have come from South Africa, written in gorgeous prose by the Booker Prize-shortlisted author Damon Galgut. Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life's unfulfilled promises; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the...
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English
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"Rebecca meets Fatima Farheen Mirza in this sweeping, gorgeously atmospheric novel about a ruined mansion by the sea, and a young girl who unearths the true story of the tragedy that happened there a hundred years ago. Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Now, nearly a century since it was built, it stands in ruins--a boardinghouse for misfits, where people come to forget or be forgotten. Seeking a new home after a painful...
14) The dogs of war
Author
Language
English
Description
A mountain containing ten billion dollars worth of platinum lies in a small republic in a remote corner of Africa. How to get the platinum? Hire a band of mercenaries to invade and overthrow the government. In other words, release the dogs of war.
15) Afterlives
Author
Language
English
Description
"From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a sweeping, multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of east Africa. 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, is...
16) Disgrace
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English
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Description
At fifty-two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking in passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and friendless. Except for his daughter, Lucy, who works her smallholding with her neighbor, Petrus, an African farmer now on the way to a modest prosperity. David's attempts to relate to Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities, are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his...
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English
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Seventeen-year-old Zélie, her older brother Tzain, and rogue princess Amari fight to restore magic to the land and activate a new generation of magi, but they are ruthlessly pursued by the crown prince, who believes the return of magic will mean the end of the monarchy.
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Dark star trilogy (Marlon James) volume 1
Language
English
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LGBTQIA Fiction
Natick-Morse Black History Month 2024
Read a retelling of an old myth/tale/tradition (Adult)
Watertown Adult Summer Reading Bingo
Natick-Morse Black History Month 2024
Read a retelling of an old myth/tale/tradition (Adult)
Watertown Adult Summer Reading Bingo
Description
"Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard. As Tracker follows...
Author
Series
Liberation trilogy volume 1
Language
English
Description
The liberation of Europe and defeat of the Third Reich is an epic story of courage and calamity, of miscalculation and enduring triumph. Sixty years after America joined the struggle, Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the Allied victory without a grasp of what unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943, where American officers learned how to lead, soldiers learned how to hate, and an army learned what it takes to vanquish a formidable...
20) Glory: a novel
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English
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"An explosive novel about the chaos of revolution, Glory centres around the unexpected fall of Old Horse, a long-serving leader of a fictional African country, and the drama that follows for an unruly nation of animals on the path to true liberation. Inspired by the unexpected fall by coup, in November 2017, of Robert Mugabe--Zimbabwe's president who took office in 1980 and...never left--Bulawayo's bold, vividly imagined novel shows a country imploding,...
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