Visar resultat för..."Picador Africa"

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, Adam Hochschild's King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of Leopold's brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian.King Leopold's Ghost is the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.'All the tension and drama that one would expect in a good novel' - Robert Harris, author of FatherlandNow part of the Picador Collection

Set amid the chaos of West Africa's civil wars, Emmanuel Dongala's striking new novel tells the story of two teenagers growing up while rival ethnic groups fight for control of their country. One young narrator, Johnny "Mad Dog," is a member of the Death Dealers, a rebel faction bent on seizing power in war-torn Congo. The other, Laokole, dreams of becoming an engineer, but as rogue militias sack the city, she is forced to leave home - and then finds herself running from the likes of Johnny.

Winner of the 2017 PEN Hessell-Tiltman PrizeWinner of the Longman History Today Trustees’ AwardLonglisted for the Orwell PrizeUnflinching and revealing, Black and British is a vital history that reveals how black British lives have been woven into the fabric of the nation for centuries – from Roman Britain to the Black Lives Matter protests.'Groundbreaking' – The Observer'A radical reappraisal’ – The Guardian'Written with great force and passion’ – The Sunday TimesDrawing on new research, original records and expert testimony, David Olusoga's Black and British shows us exactly why black history is not a separate or marginalized story, but an integral part of Britain's cultural and economic life.Stretching back as far as Roman Britain, the medieval imagination, Elizabethan ‘blackamoors’ and the global slave-trading empire, it shows that the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery, and that black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of both World Wars.Now fully revised and updated to include the Windrush scandal and the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a history that reveals how the lives of black and white Britons have been entwined for centuries – a history that belongs to us all.Now in the Picador Collection.

In 2000, Tom Zoellner purchased a diamond engagement ring and proposed. His girlfriend said, "yes" and then, suddenly, walked out of his life making Tom the owner of a used engagement ring. Instead of hitting the self-help shelves of his local bookstore, he hit the road travelling to diamond mines in Africa, Canada, India, Brazil and Russia to discover the true worth of this shining gem. He travelled to Japan to understand how diamonds were linked with engagements and delved into the history of our own romance with the diamond ring. He gained entry to DeBeers, the London diamond merchants. He visited shopping mall jewellers with starry-eyed couples. Through all of his travels, he searched for an answer to the question "How has one stone created empires, ruined lives, inspired lust and emptied wallets throughout history?" A diamond version of Susan Orleans' "The Orchid Thief", Tom Zoellner's The Heartless Stone is a journey to the cold heart of the world's most unyielding gem.

The people of Uganda have struggled to bury the worst of their history, but after the violent reign of Idi Amin, reminders were never far from view. A stray clue to the 1972 disappearance of a man named Eliphaz Laki led his son to a shallow grave. From there he found the three executioners, among them Amin's chief of staff. Laki's discovery resulted in a trial that painfully gave voice to a nation's past. At once a mystery, a historical accounting, and a portrait of modern Africa, "The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does not Forget" is above all an exploration of how - and whether - the past can be laid to rest.

In 2007, the International Rescue Committee (IRC),which brings relief to countries in the wake of war, wanted to understand what really happened to women, in post-conflict zones. Answers came through the point and click of a digital camera. On behalf of the IRC, Ann Jones spent two years travelling through Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East, lending cameras to women who had no other means of telling the world what war had done to their lives. Their photographs are a chronicle of the consequences of modern warfare for the most vulnerable. Animated by the voices of brave and resourceful women, "War Is Not Over When It's Over" is a powerful dispatch from the ruins.

In Half a Life we are introduced to the compelling figure of Willie Chandran. Springing from the unhappy union of a low-caste mother and a father constantly at odds with life, Willie is naively eager to find something that will place him both in and apart from the world. Drawn to England, and to the immigrant and bohemian communities of post-war London, it is only in his first experience of love that he finally senses the possibility of fulfilment.In its humorous and sensitive vision of the half-lives quietly lived out at the centre of our world, V. S. Naipaul’s graceful novel brings its own unique illumination to essential aspects of our shared history.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.‘Parts are as sly and funny as anything Naipaul has written. Nobody who enjoys seeing English beautifully controlled should miss this novel’ – John Carey, Sunday Times

Salim has spent most of his life on the east coast of Africa, living and working with his family. When he sets out to build a new life for himself, moving to an unnamed country in the heart of the continent, he believes he is doing so to fulfil his duty as a man. He buys a small shop in a sleepy town, at a bend in the river, where he sells sundries to the locals.First published in 1979, A Bend in the River is V. S. Naipaul’s vivid exploration of post-colonial Africa at the time of independence. Serving as a microcosm of this changing world, his bend in the river is a scene of chaos, violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation and poverty. And from this rich landscape emerges one of the author’s most potent works – a truly moving story of historical upheaval and social breakdown.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

In V. S. Naipaul's Magic Seeds we follow Willie Chandran, a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. In his early forties, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the encouragement of his sister – and his own listlessness – and joins an underground movement in India. But years of revolutionary campaigns and then prison convince him that the revolution ‘had nothing to do with what we were fighting for’, and he feels himself further than ever ‘from his own history’.When he returns to Britain where, thirty years before, his wanderings began, Willie encounters a country that has turned its back on its past and, like him, has become detached from its own history. He endures the indignities of a culture dissipated by reform and compromise until, in a moment of grotesque revelation – a tour de force of parodic savagery from our most visionary of writers – Willie comes to an understanding that might finally allow him to release his true self.‘A radical further step in one of the great imaginative careers of our time . . . Magic Seeds demands our attention, and nothing more authoritative will be published this year’ – Philip Hensher, Daily TelegraphNow part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

Moving beyond travelogue, V. S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa considers the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of African civilization.Beginning in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, Naipaul’s journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and ends, as the country does, in South Africa.Focusing upon the theme of belief – though sometimes the political or economical realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account – Naipaul examines the fragile but enduring quality of the old world of magic. To witness the ubiquity of such ancient ritual, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of this book.‘The quality of Naipaul’s writing – simple, concise, engaging – rarely varies . . . Above all, Naipaul’s latest African journey is eyewitness reporting at its best’ – TimePart of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

In Cameroon in 1931, Sara is taken from her family and brought to Mount Pleasant as a gift for Sultan Njoya, the Bamum leader cast into exile by French colonialists, when she is just nine years old. Sara's story takes an unexpected turn when she is recognised by Bertha, the slave in charge of training Njoya's brides, as Nebu, the son she lost tragically years before. In her new life as a boy, she bears witness to the world of Sultan Njoya - a magical yet declining place of artistic and intellectual minds. Seven decades later, a student returns home to Cameroon to research the place it once was, and she finds Sara, silent for decades, ready to tell her story. In her serpentine tale, a lost kingdom lives again in the compromised intersection between flawed memory, tangled fiction, and faintly discernible truth. The award-winning novelist Patrice Nganang's lyrical and majestic Mount Pleasant is a resurrection of the world of early-twentieth-century Cameroon and an elegy for the men and women swept up in the forces of colonisation. For readers of Maaza Mengiste and Taiye Selasi.