About this item
"Not since Remains of the Day has an author so skillfully revealed the way history's layers are often invisible to all but its participants . . . Gorgeous." -- John Freeman, Boston Globe on The Hired Man London. A fox makes its way across Waterloo Bridge. The distraction causes two pedestrians to collide -- Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist there to deliver a keynote speech. From this chance encounter, Aminatta Forna's unerring powers of observation show how in the midst of the rush of a great city lie numerous moments of connection. Attila has arrived in London with two tasks: to deliver a keynote speech on trauma, as he has done many times before; and to contact the daughter of friends, his "niece" who hasn't called home in a while.
About the Author
Aminatta's books have been translated into eighteen languages. Her essays have appeared in and . She has written stories for BBC radio and written and presented television documentaries including "The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu" (BBC Television, 2009) and "Girl Rising" (CNN, 2013) .Aminatta is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Folio Academy. She has acted as judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Bailey Prize for Women's Fiction, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Caine Prize and the International Man Booker Prize. In 2003 Aminatta established the Rogbonko Project to build a school in a village in Sierra Leone. The charity has also run a number of projects in the spheres of adult education, sanitation and maternal health. Aminatta is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, has won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award 2011, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. She has been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize for Literature, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the IMPAC Award and the Warwick Prize. Aminatta Forna was made OBE in the Queen's New Year's Honours 2017. She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
