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A Life Elsewhere

by Segun Afolabi - £8.99  Vintage (2007)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780099485186 | ISBN 10: 0099485184

For the characters in Segun Afolabi's debut collection, 'elsewhere' is a place they must transform into home. The Far East, Europe, the Americas, Africa - the stories are as varied as their geographical settings. In the award-winning 'Monday Morning' a refugee boy puzzles out his place in a new land. A bereaved father in 'Arithmetic' thinks back to a confusing, youthful sexual encounter that has left him emotionally scarred; Jacinta faces a long retirement with a husband she is not sure she likes in 'Jumbo and Jacinta' and 'The Wine Guitar' tells the story of an aging musician who pays a prostitute for the gift of her youth.
 
These are tales of Diaspora, of people making their lives in new lands, some for the first time, others in the second or third generations. Often moving, sometimes funny and occasionally shocking, Afolabi's stories reflect the way we live now; exploring the universal need to establish family and identity in a world where the boundaries of geography, culture and language are increasingly fluid.
 
Afolabi's elegantly restrained prose and his fascination with the internal emotional lives of his characters - the often painful negotiation of relationships and navigation of life's uncertainties - mark him as a highly original and engaging new literary voice.

"Segun Afolabi is a writer of tremendous talent. His stories are subtley told and elegantly executed. His greatest skill though, is one possessed by only a few writers. He offers his readers a different way of seeing. And in so doing he elevates himself above the merely talented towards becoming a writer who will certainly make his mark in the world of literature."
(Aminatta Forna)

(Price & availability last checked: June 2018)

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