The Door of No Return
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
The #1 New York Times bestseller
Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Writing
'At once vivid and simple, lyrical and surgical, expressive and exacting' Lupita Nyong'o
Dreams are today’s answers for tomorrow’s questions.
Eleven-year-old Kofi Offin has dreams of water, of its urgent whisper that beckons with promises and secrets. He has heard the call on the banks of Upper Kwanta, West Africa, where he lives. He loves these things above all else: his family, the fireside tales of his father’s father, a girl named Ama, and, of course, swimming. But when the unthinkable – a sudden death – occurs during a festival between rival villages, Kofi ends up in a fight for his life. What happens next will send him on a harrowing journey across land and sea, and away from everything he loves. Yet Kofi’s dreams may be the key to his freedom…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Newbery Medalist Alexander's gripping historical novel in verse, a trilogy opener rooted in the Asante Kingdom in 1860, centers 11-year-old Kofi Offin—a child deeply connected to water. In early, lyrical chapters that evoke a dreamlike childhood, Kofi lives with his family in Upper Kwanta, where he swims in the river that is his namesake, engages with best mate Ebo, crushes on longtime friend Ama, and listens to the tales of his village-storyteller grandfather, Nana Mosi—who details "the past/ like it lives/ in him,/ like it still matters." He also clashes with his cousin, a bully, and Mr. Goodluck Phillip, the schoolteacher imparting "the Queen's English" and Shakespeare to students speaking their native Twi. When an annual festival pits wrestlers from Upper and Lower Kwanta against one another, and Kofi's older brother, Kwasi, is set to represent their village, an unexpected death sets off a series of tragedies that upend Kofi's world. Interweaving moments of joyful exuberance and heartbreaking sadness via sensate lines by turns sweet and stinging, Alexander's sweeping novel conjures a captivating, resonant world of African tradition, life, and ancestral wisdom. Ages 10–up.
