Anar Ali’s Night of Power is a searing and beautiful novel. With perfect pitch, the story glides between the perspectives of father, mother, and son. It is an honest and utterly engaging meditation about love and loss, tenderness and violence, adaptability and delusion, dislocation and rebirth.
Some say that home is where the heart is, and two of the year's most anticipated debut novels explore the push and pull of culture and community in the lives of first and second generation Canadian families, one from Uganda and the other from Ethiopia.
Night of Power
by Anar Ali is a portrait of a Muslim family—from the heady days in Uganda to hard times in a new country and a tragic accident that forces them to confront the ghosts of the past. Anar Ali’s debut novel vividly illuminates the injustices of displacement and the nuances of identity—of losing a home and coming home again.
In Rebecca Fisseha’s
Daughters of Silence,
a cosmopolitan flight attendant from Canada, grieving her mother’s recent death, finds herself stranded in Addis Ababa—her birth place. As she reacquaints herself with her grandfather’s house, familiar yet strangely alien, she pieces together the family secrets: the trauma of dictatorship and civil war, the shame of unwed motherhood, the abuse met with silence that gives shape to the mystery of her mother’s life.
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