Say You're One of Them
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4.0 • 23 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
An Oprah's Book Club selection: this "electrifying" book (Washington Post) pays tribute to the wisdom and resilience of children even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.
Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few readers will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.
In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa.
Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent.
One of the best books of the year: Wall Street Journal, People, Bloomberg News, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post Book World, and Entertainment Weekly
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Uwem Akpan’s debut story collection unfolds with grace and devastation. Five stories, each set in a different part of Africa, make up the book, and they contain some grim scenarios—a brother and sister realize they’re going to be sold into slavery after their parents die of AIDS, a girl hides in a bedroom while genocide unfolds around her. But amidst the carnage, there are also plenty of quietly moving moments. Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit priest, puts us right in the middle of the action with a sense of suspense, an eye for detail, and a dash of down-to-earth poetry. His writing is both unflinching and kind, and made us understand the importance of empathy in our own lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nigerian-born Jesuit priest Akpan transports the reader into gritty scenes of chaos and fear in his rich debut collection of five long stories set in war-torn Africa. "An Ex-mas Feast" tells the heartbreaking story of eight-year-old Jigana, a Kenyan boy whose 12-year-old sister, Maisha, works as a prostitute to support her family. Jigana's mother quells the children's hunger by having them sniff glue while they wait for Maisha to earn enough to bring home a holiday meal. In "Luxurious Hearses," Jubril, a teenage Muslim, flees the violence in northern Nigeria. Attacked by his own Muslim neighbors, his only way out is on a bus transporting Christians to the south. In "Fattening for Gabon," 10-year-old Kotchikpa and his younger sister are sent by their sick parents to live with their uncle, Fofo Kpee, who in turn explains to the children that they are going to live with their prosperous "godparents," who, as Kotchikpa pieces together, are actually human traffickers. Akpan's prose is beautiful and his stories are insightful and revealing, made even more harrowing because all the horror and there is much is seen through the eyes of children. Read a web-exclusive q&a with Uwem Akpan at www.publishersweekly.com/akpan.
Customer Reviews
Say you're one of them is so touching
I hesitated a long time to buy this book because I prefer novels to short stories. I was delighted to find these stories so rich that each one was like a novel.
I have a much clearer understanding of the people of Africa and their struggles from reading this book than I have ever had from the news and movies. We need more writers who tell these truths to the rest of the world.