Pre-Election 411: Red, Green, Blue, and Happiness

The  March 7 election in Sierra Leone is definitely one event Sierra Leoneans are watching for in the first half of 2018.

While there's probably nothing more important than who gets to rule the small West African nation for the next five years, there's something else that will hit the Richter scale.

Aminatta Forna's newest novel will launch March 2018 in the United States (Atlantic Monthly Press). For readers in Britain, the book will be available in  April from Bloomsbury UK.

Aminatta was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Britain. She is the award-winning author of the novels The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water.

The Times of London calls Aminatta "an unsparing chronicler of human vices."

Happiness, her new novel, is about how a chance meeting of Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist, and Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, on Waterloo Bridge, London, 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 multicultural 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.

Read more here

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