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A breathtaking novel from Orange Prize-shortlisted and Commonwealth Writers´ Prize-winning author Aminatta Forna

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A breathtaking novel from Orange Prize-shortlisted and Commonwealth Writers´ Prize-winning author Aminatta Forna

LONGLISTED FOR JHALAK PRIZE 2019

Waterloo Bridge, London. Two strangers collide. Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist, and Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes. From this chance encounter in the midst of the rush of a great city, numerous moments of connections span out and interweave, bringing disparate lives together.

Attila has arrived in London with two tasks: to deliver a keynote speech on trauma and to check up on the daughter of friends, his ´niece´, Ama, who hasn´t called home in a while. It soon emerges that she has been swept up in an immigration crackdown - and now her young son Tano is missing.

When, by chance, Attila bumps into Jean again, she joins him in his search for Tano, mobilizing into action the network she has built up, mainly from the many West African immigrants working London´s myriad streets, of volunteer fox-spotters: security guards, hotel doormen, traffic wardens. All unite to help and as the search continues, a deepening friendship between Attila and Jean unfolds.

In this delicate yet powerful novel of loves lost and new, of past griefs and of the hidden side of a teeming metropolis, Aminatta Forna asks us to consider the values of the society we live in, our co-existence with one another and all living creatures - and the true nature of happiness.

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Forna´s voice is relentlessly compelling, her ability to summon atmosphere extraordinary, her sympathetic portrayal of traffic wardens, street performers, security guards, hotel doormen a thing of lasting beauty. It is as if the author has privileged access into multiple spheres of existence, learning the secret languages of each, conferring dignity and consequence on these figures who often pass unseen and unrecorded in our accounts of contemporary life Observer

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Forna, Aminatta
Aminatta Forna is the author of the novels The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and the memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water. Her books have won multiple prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers´ Prize Book Award, and been shortlisted for many others, among them the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Neustadt Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Dublin International IMPAC Award. In 2014 Forna won the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, an award from Yale University in honour of an author´s body of work.
Forna has acted as judge for a number of literary awards, including the International Man Booker. She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. In 2017, she was awarded an OBE.

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