Our Beautiful Darkness
A Graphic Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A blackout leads two teens to discover the intimacy and vulnerability that can only be shared in darkness in Our Beautiful Darkness, a fully illustrated YA novella from celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki and illustrator António Jorge Gonçalves.
Translated from Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
A Kirkus Best YA Book of 2024
Selected for the USBBY Outstanding International Book List, 2025
Selected for the shortlist for the 2025 Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated Young Adult Book Prize
A Five Books Best New Book for Teens of 2024
The light goes out suddenly. And in this absence of light, a pair of teenagers bare their souls. Into the warm silence of the night, they share a conversation filled with their stories and dreams… and maybe even a first kiss.
Set against the backdrop of the civil war that ravaged Angola in the 1990s, this book weaves the country’s history with a teenage boy’s family stories. But when a power outage shrouds the neighborhood in darkness, everyday realities fade away… As the boy and a girl sit talking in the backyard, memory gives way to imagination and vulnerability, and the space between them becomes charged with emotional electricity.
Their resulting conversation is both a meditation on the storytelling impulse and a gripping narrative of first love that, through its particulars, ascends to the universal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two teenage paramours navigate a metropolitan blackout's full duration in this arresting graphic novel by Angola author Ondjaki (Transparent City), illustrated by Portuguese creator Gonçalves as a series of white, chalk-like images on a black background. Via the first-person POV of one of two unnamed characters, the teen reflects on the vastness of the universe and the people within it while pining for their crush's affection. Rarely interrupted void-like blank space neatly juxtaposes the author's spare storytelling, which focuses intensely on feelings and specific sensory experiences such as touch and limited sight. The reader is provided only enough visual information to ground them in the moment: a canopy of stars above a darkened skyline, the starlit silhouette of an owl in a tree, a vague interpretation of the eyes of the person the protagonist longs to kiss. Ondjaki's prose is imbued with a touching sense of existential whimsy: "My eyes closed. I think hers did too. In that riddle of darkness, a kiss had room to happen." This artful romanticism carries the characters through the darkness—which is sometimes lit by candles or the headlights of passing vehicles—in which they experience laughter, a light show, and at last, an end to their yearning. A translator's note by Miller-Lachmann (Eyes Open) concludes. Ages 12–up.
