 First edition (UK) | |
| Author | Aminatta Forna |
|---|---|
| Country | Scotland |
| Language | English |
| Published | 2006 |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury (UK) Atlantic Monthly Press (US) |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 317 |
| ISBN | 9780747584797 |
| OCLC | 65203382 |
Ancestor Stones (2006) is a novel by British writer Aminatta Forna about the experiences of four women in a polygamous family in West Africa.
Uzodinma Iweala of The New York Times , reviewing Ancestor Stones, "wanted to know more: how the characters feel about one another, not just how they feel about the chaotic events they’re describing." [1] Bernardine Evaristo, writing in The Guardian , described this book to be "a wonderfully ambitious novel written from the inside" and concluded "This is her [Forna's] first novel, but it is too sophisticated to read like one." [2]
Ancestor Stones has also been reviewed by Booklist , [3] Choice Reviews , [4] Library Journal , [5] Publishers Weekly , [6] Kirkus Reviews , [7] African Business , [8] Entertainment Weekly , [9] and The New Yorker . [10]
Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings's PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.
Helon Habila Ngalabak is a Nigerian novelist and poet, whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize in 2001. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before moving in 2002 to England, where he was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia, and now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
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Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika FRSL is a British-Nigerian writer of novels, short stories and essays and an active member of the literary community, particularly supporting and amplifying young writers and female voices. She is the author of two well-received novels, In Dependence (2009) and Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun (2016), as well as the non-fiction collection Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora (2022), and her writing has appeared in publications including Granta, Transition, Guernica, and OZY, and previously served as founding Books Editor of OZY. Manyika's work also features in the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a British writer of Scottish and Sierra Leonean ancestry. Her first book was a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002). Since then she has written four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). In 2021 she published a collection of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. (2021), which was a new genre for her.
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The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest is a 2002 book by Aminatta Forna about her childhood and an investigation into the execution of her father, Mohamed Forna. It was serialised as a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 and was runner-up for the 2003 Samuel Johnson Prize.
The Memory of Love is a 2010 novel by Aminatta Forna about the experiences of three men in Sierra Leone. In 2022, it was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.
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Forna conveys the complexity of life in small African villages ..
Ancestor Stones reads much like a memoir but--perhaps for that reason--is less compelling than her earlier work.
Because of the shifting time periods, the array of names, and the complicated family connections, the characters blend together, and it is difficult to identify each from one story to the next. However, Forna, .. beautifully crafts an intimate portrait of the evolution of one West African community.
Forna's work sheds light on the history of a long-struggling nation.
Forna (The Devil That Danced on the Water, 2003) creates, through the voices of these wizened creatures, a richly patterned mosaic of African culture and history.
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