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Pantheon
November 2012
On Sale: November 6, 2012
272 pages
ISBN: 0307907694
EAN: 9780307907691
Kindle: B0082XLQW8
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
World-renowned Kenyan novelist, poet, playwright, and
literary critic Ng˜ug˜ý wa Thiong’o gives us the second
volume of his memoirs in the wake of his critically
acclaimed Dreams in a Time of War.
In
the House of the Interpreter richly and poignantly
evokes the author’s life and times at boarding school—the
first secondary educational institution in British-ruled
Kenya—in the 1950s, against the backdrop of the tumultuous
Mau Mau Uprising for independence and Kenyan sovereignty.
While Ng˜ug˜ý has been enjoying scouting trips, chess
tournaments, and reading about the fictional RAF pilot
adventurer Biggles at the prestigious Alliance High School
near Nairobi, things have been changing rapidly at home.
Poised as he is between two worlds, Ng˜ug˜ý returns home for
his first visit since starting school to find his house
razed and the entire village moved up the road, closer to a
guard checkpoint. Later, his brother Good Wallace, a member
of the insurgency, is captured by the British and taken to a
concentration camp. As for Ng˜ug˜ý himself, he falls victim
to the forces of colonialism in the person of a police
officer encountered on a bus journey, and he is thrown into
jail for six days. In his second year at Alliance High
School, the boarding school that was his haven in a
heartless world is shattered by investigations, charges of
disloyalty, and the politics of civil
unrest.
In the House of the Interpreter
hauntingly describes the formative experiences of a young
man who would become a world-class writer and, as a
political dissident, a moral compass to us all. It is a
winning celebration of the implacable determination of youth
and the power of hope.
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