Search Results: Authors starting with V from Oasis in the Diaspora

A.A. Knopf, 2004. Pristine. M. G. Vassanji, author of The Book of Secrets, winner of the first Giller prize, brings us a novel that is rich in sensuous detail and political insight, and brilliantly captures the tyranny of history and memory, and questions one's role and responsibility in lawless times. Born in colonial Kenya, Vikram Lall comes of age at the same moment as the colony, which in 1953 is celebrating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II even as the Mau Mau independence movement is challenging British rule. But while Kenya is being torn apart by idealism, doubt and violent political upheaval, Vic and his sister Deepa begin to search for their place in the world. Neither colonists nor African, neither white nor black, the Indian brother and sister find themselves somewhere in between in their band of playmates: Bill and Annie, British children, and Njoroge, an African boy. These are the friendships that will haunt the rest of their lives. We follow Vic from a changing Africa in the… Read More

Grove Press, 2003. Uncorrected proof. Good. When fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield draws a naked woman on the pages of Genesis in fire-engine red lipstick during Sunday school, the rural black community of Pyke County, Mississippi, is scandalized. Her mother, mortified by the small-town gossip and determined to teach Maddy the perils of her youthful intelligence, forces her to spend weekends caring for her estranged Aunt Pip, an outcast who lives on the wrong side of town and is dying of cancer. The lessons Maddy learns there are ones that could not be taught in any church.Shuttling between the home she shares with her parents - endlessly locked in a cycle of resentment, violence, and only sporadic tenderness - and the house of tough, strong-minded Aunt Pip out on Commitment Road, Maddy feels her eyes gradually opening to the complicated dynamics that inform her world. As the once self-possessed, fiery Pip wastes away in body and spirit, Maddy is forced to confront the brutal finality of death… Read More