Aminatta Forna

In this story of a woman's search for a meaningful life, Alcott moves outside the family setting of her best knows works. Originally published in 1872, Work is both an exploration of Alcott's personal conflicts and a social critique, examining women's independence, the moral significance of labor, and the goals to which a woman can aspire. Influenced by Transcendentalism and by the women's rights movement, it affirms the possibility of a feminized utopian society.

An African city, where a dying man Elias Cole, reflects on a past obsession: Saffia, the woman he loved, and Julius, her charismatic, unpredictable husband. Arriving in the wake of war Adrian Lockheart is a psychologist new to this foreign land, struggling with its secrets and the intensity of the heat, dust and dirt, until he finds friendship in Kai Mansaray, a young colleague at the hospital. All three lives will collide in a story about friendship, love, war, about understanding the indelible effects of the past and the nature of obsessive love.

"Exposing the myths and challenging the rhetoric, this book is the first real attempt to rethink our concept of mothering and its responsibilities. By revealing how we have arrived at a particular model of motherhood, it offers a new approach to raising children - one where the needs of mothers, fathers and others are more evenly balanced with those of the child."--BOOK JACKET.

The biggest loser in high school goes out one night to return a DVD and gets attacked by a blood-sucking woman. She asks if he wants to die or live. He chooses to live ... but he's back in school he finds himself craving blood. When his desire becomes unbearable, and realizes he has climbed onto a female classmate and is trying to bite her neck. He stops himself, but she hugs him close. She asks, "Did you really want me that much?."

In tales of love, marriage, war and woman's subtle triumph, Serah, Mary, Hawa and Asana lift the past from their shoulders and hand it to their niece as a luminous treasure trove of memories, of lives lived, terrors faced and pleasures tasted.

"Aminatta Forna's intensely personal history is a passionate and vivid account of an African childhood, an idyll that became the stuff of nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of post-colonial Africa, danger, flight, the bitterness of exile in Britain, and the terrible consequences of her dissident father's stand against tyranny.". "Mohamed Forna was a man of unimpeachable integrity and great charisma. As Sierra Leone faced its future as a fledgling democracy, he was a new star in the political firmament, a man who had been one of the first black students to come to Britain after the war. Already a political firebrand and a stylish dresser, he stole the heart of Aminatta's mother, to the dismay of her Presbyterian parents, and returned with her to Sierra Leone. But as Aminatta Forna shows with compelling clarity, the old Africa was torn apart by the new ways of Western parliamentary democracy, which gave birth only to dictatorships and corruption of hitherto undreamed-of magnitude. It was not long before Mohamed Forna languished in jail as a prisoner of conscience, and worse was to follow.". "Aminatta's search for the truth that shaped both her childhood and the nation's destiny began among the country's elite and took her into the heart of rebel territory. Determined to break the silence surrounding her father's fate, she ultimately uncovered a conspiracy that penetrated the highest reaches of government and forced the nation's politicians to confront their guilt."--BOOK JACKET.