Café Babanussa
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A moving portrait of a young woman’s experience of life, love and the shifting tides of mental health in 1980s–era Berlin
In this beautifully written and moving novel, informed by many of the author’s own experiences, a young mixed-race woman travels from Canada to Germany to start her life anew. Ruby Edwards, escaping a loving but at times overbearing family, throws herself into the shifting social and political sinews of 1980s-era West Berlin—a time of new music, punk rockers, travellers, racial tensions and a beating pulse of artistic energy. Here, Ruby finds love and new challenges, striving to discover the person she was meant to be. But the highs become too high and the lows too low, and Ruby finds herself plunged into the depths of mental illness. With courage and determination, Ruby again and again pulls herself back from the brink and revels in what matters most to her—her family, her community and her own individuality. Inspiring and heart-rending, Cafe Babanussa is an engrossing, deftly crafted novel by a voice that was lost to us all too soon.
Also includes Karen Hill’s original essay, “On Being Crazy”.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Hill's debut novel, to live with a mental illness is to eat ravenously, love deeply, and dress beautifully, all while tiptoeing on the edge of a canyon that can swallow the sufferer at any moment. Ruby Edwards surprises her family by announcing that she is leaving their Toronto home to start a life in Berlin. There she learns more about her identity as a black woman, falls in love with a local named Werner, and assembles a group of close friends. But her new life is disrupted, first when her physical health begins to fail, and then when voices and delusions begin to haunt her. Her mental health deteriorates quickly and she is institutionalized. This pattern build up a life, fall in love, fall apart, find healing becomes the framework for Ruby's life. Hill's posthumously published novel is bookended by a foreword by her brother, author Lawrence Hill, and her own essay about her lifelong battle with mental illness. These artifacts tell a tale of a life well lived in the moments between bouts. There are flaws in the writing, but Hill's book will speak deeply to anyone who has lived with a similar mental illness or loved someone who has.
