"Partout dans le monde, la question du genre est cruciale. Alors j'aimerais aujourd'hui que nous nous mettions à rêver à un monde différent et à le préparer. Un monde plus équitable. Un monde où les hommes et les femmes seront plus heureux et plus honnêtes envers eux-mêmes. Et voici le point de départ : nous devons élever nos filles autrement. Nous devons élever nos fils autrement." Dans ces deux discours, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie porte une voix, rare et puissante, d'émancipation.
Romy Hall is starting two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility. Her crime ? The killing of her stalker. Inside awaits a world where women must hustle and fight for the bare essentials. Outside : the San Francisco of her youth. The Mars Room strip club where she was once a dancer. Her seven-year-old son, Jackson. As Romy forms friendships over liquor brewed in socks and stories shared through sewage pipes her future seems to unfurl in one long, unwavering line - until news from beyond the prison bars forces Romy to try and outrun her destiny.
This is the story of a family - of the simple, devastating ways in which families tear themselves apart, and of the incredible lengths to which a family will go to put itself back together. It is the story of one family, the Sais, whose good life crumbles in an evening; a Ghanaian father, Kwaku Sai, who becomes a highly respected surgeon in the US only to be disillusioned by a grotesque injustice; his Nigerian wife, Fola, the beautiful homemaker abandoned in his wake; their eldest son, Olu, determined to reconstruct the life his father should have had; their twins, seductive Taiwo and acclaimed artist Kehinde, both brilliant but scarred and flailing; their youngest, Sadie, jealously in love with her beautiful college friend. All of them sent reeling on their disparate paths into the world. Until, one day, tragedy spins the Sais in a new direction. This is the story of a family: torn apart by lies, reunited by grief. A family absolved, ultimately, by that bitter but most tenuous bond: familial love. Ghana Must Gointerweaves the stories of the Sais in a rich and moving drama of separation and reunion, spanning generations and cultures from West Africa to New England, London, New York and back again. It is a debut novel of blazing originality and startling power by a writer of extraordinary gifts. 'Most impressive. A novel of today.' Penelope Lively
Born on the shores of Lake Ontario, Grania O'Neill suffers a childhood illness that destroys her hearing. Grania's life without sound is also a life bounded by a powerful family love that tries to protect her from suffering. But when it becomes clear that Grania can no longer thrive among the hearing, her family sends her to the Ontario School for the Deaf. There, protected from the often unforgiving world outside, she learns sign language and speech. And there she meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man, and the two, in wonderment, begin to create a new emotional vocabulary that encompasses both sound and silence. But a war is raging on the other side of the world. Only two weeks after their wedding, Jim must leave home to serve as a stretcher-bearer on the blood-soaked battlefields of Flanders. During this long and brutal war of attrition, Jim and Grania are pulled to the centre of cataclysmic events that will alter civilisation forever.
