City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

How beautiful we were, Imbolo Mbue ; read by Prentice Onayemi, Janina Edwards, Dion Graham, JD Jackson, Allyson Johnson and Lisa Renee Pitts

eng

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fiction

How beautiful we were

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Imbolo Mbue ; read by Prentice Onayemi, Janina Edwards, Dion Graham, JD Jackson, Allyson Johnson and Lisa Renee Pitts

We should have known the end was near. So, begins Imbolo Mbue's powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made and ignored. The country's government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price. Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community's determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman's willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people's freedom

adult

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