I dragged my feet with this book for a long time. The character sketches were phenomenal, but something about the style kept me at a distance and it was a great effort to keep turning pages. Even being laid up during the covid-19 lockdown didn't help. Have to mark as 'abandoned'.
“Where can a person girded with a belt of peace find truth and justice in this world?”- Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Matigari The story takes place in a newly-independent Kenya. Like in other recently independent countries, their former masters still have a very strong presence and much control. Matigari ma N...
A Grain of Wheat centres a political narrative about the struggle for independence and liberation in Kenya; about rebellion against British imperialism, and on this level it is searing, laying bare the injustice from the point of view of a richly varied cast of rural Kenyan people. Ngugi draws on Co...
A story of Kenyan independence and the toll the preceding struggle took on people.Well, this is embarrassing--I don't know what to rate this. Based on the first couple pages I'd pegged it as a slog, and not expecting to enjoy it but feeling I should read it anyway for my world fiction challenge, rea...
Enjoyable and informative, definitely worth reading if you are curious to know more about the Mau Mau Rebellion 1952-1960 which lead to Kenyan Independence from Britain in 1963. Laid before you are the author's childhood memories up to his acceptance and arrival at high school. He is today a famed, ...
'A Grain of Wheat' centers on Kenya's Uhuru, its attainment of independence and self-government, a time of celebration and pride. But Thiong'o uses it as a backdrop for a dark drama that is anything but celebratory. It is bleak and difficultly written. The first time I tried to read it I couldn't be...
I found this story to be very reminiscent of one of my favourite books, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, as both stories deal with the turmoil, changes and confusion that arose in Africa after Christianity was introduced. In The River Between, two communities of Kikuyu (a Kenyan ethnic group), one...
This is the first book I have read by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and I was swept away by it. Written in 1977, Petals of Blood recreates many of the tensions in Kenya at the time. Although the book is anchored by investigation into the murder of three highly placed Kenyan officials, it is at heart a sweeping...
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