Download or read book Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow written by Faïza Guène and published by HMH. This book was released on 2006-07-03 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “touching, furious, sharp, and very funny” novel of an immigrant teenage girl finding her own identity in France (Booklist). The Paradise projects are only a few metro stops from Paris, but it feels like a different world. Doria’s father, aka the Beard, has headed back to their hometown in Morocco, leaving her and her mom to cope with their mektoub, their destiny, alone. They have a little help—from a social worker sent by the city, a psychiatrist sent by the school, and a thug friend who recites Rimbaud. It seems like fate has dealt them an impossible hand, but Doria might still make a new life—“with bravado, humor, and a healthy dose of rage” (St. Petersburg Times). “[A] sassy, spunky tale . . . Doria has what it takes to storm any barricade.” —The Hartford Courant “[Doria is] as likable as Holden Caulfield or Prep’s Lee Fiora. Readers will cheer. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal, starred review “A promising addition to the world’s literary voices.” —The Miami Herald “Moving and irreverent, sad and funny, full of rage and intelligence. Her voice is fresh, and her book a delight.” —Laila Lalami, bestselling author of The Moor’s Account

Download or read book Just Like Tomorrow written by Faïza Guène and published by Red Fox. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in France in 2004 by Hachette Literatures under the title Kiffe Kiffe Demain. Translated from the French by Sarah Adams.

Download or read book Some Dream for Fools written by Faïza Guène and published by HMH. This book was released on 2010-08-09 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel of a twentysomething, Algerian-born woman living on the edge in France, from “one of the hottest literary talents of multicultural Europe” (Sunday Telegraph). When Ahlème’s mother was killed in a village massacre, she left Algeria for France with her father and brother and never returned. Now, more than a decade later, she is practically French, yet in many ways she remains an outsider. Ahlème’s dreams for a better life have been displaced by the harsh realities she faces every day. Her father is unable to work after an accident at his construction site and her brother boils over with adolescent energy, teetering dangerously close to choosing a life of crime. As a temporary resident, Ahlème could at any moment be sent back to a village and a life that are now more foreign than Paris. In Some Dream for Fools, Faïza Guène explores the disparity between the expectations and limitations of immigrant life in the West and tells a remarkable story of one woman’s courage to dream. “With a keen eye for detail and a sharp narrative tone, [Guène] gives voice to a hurt too long unrecognized. . . . [She] takes us into another world—a world that no nation today can afford to ignore.” —The Christian Science Monitor

Download or read book Men Don t Cry written by Faiza Guene and published by . This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tender and refreshing tale of family life, clashing cultures and belonging in France.

Download or read book A Pocket Full of Murder written by R. J. Anderson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A determined young girl joins forces with an adventure-loving street boy to save her father’s life in this “thoroughly entertaining” (Kirkus Reviews) magical murder mystery. In the spell-powered city of Tarreton, the wealthy have all the magic they desire while the working class can barely afford a simple spell to heat their homes. Twelve-year-old Isaveth is poor, but she’s also brave, loyal, and zealous in the pursuit of justice—which is lucky, because her father has just been wrongfully arrested for murder. Isaveth is determined to prove his innocence. Quiz, the eccentric, eyepatch-wearing street boy who befriends her, swears he can’t resist a good mystery. Together they set out to solve the magical murder of one of Tarreton’s most influential citizens and save Isaveth’s beloved Papa from execution. But is Quiz truly helping Isaveth out of friendship, or does he have hidden motives of his own?

Download or read book Black Mamba Boy written by Nadifa Mohamed and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yemen, 1935. Jama is a "market boy," a half-feral child scavenging with his friends in the dusty streets of a great seaport. For Jama, life is a thrilling carnival, at least when he can fill his belly. When his mother—alternately raging and loving—dies young, she leaves him only an amulet stuffed with one hundred rupees. Jama decides to spend her life's meager savings on a search for his never-seen father; the rumors that travel along clan lines report that he is a driver for the British somewhere in the north. So begins Jama's extraordinary journey of more than a thousand miles north all the way to Egypt, by camel, by truck, by train, but mostly on foot. He slings himself from one perilous city to another, fiercely enjoying life on the road and relying on his vast clan network to shelter him and point the way to his father, who always seems just a day or two out of reach. In his travels, Jama will witness scenes of great humanity and brutality; he will be caught up in the indifferent, grinding machine of war; he will crisscross the Red Sea in search of working papers and a ship. Bursting with life and a rough joyfulness, Black Mamba Boy is debut novelist Nadifa Mohamed's vibrant, moving celebration of her family's own history.

Download or read book Modern France written by Vanessa R. Schwartz and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-10-10 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French Revolution, politics and the modern nation -- French and the civilizing mission -- Paris and magnetic appeal -- France stirs up the melting pot -- France hurtles into the future.

Download or read book The Selfless Act of Breathing written by JJ Bola and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Black teacher searches for himself across the United States in this “emotive, brave” (Daily Mail, London) story for all of us who have fantasized about escaping our daily lives and starting over. Michael Kabongo is a British Congolese teacher living in London and living the dream: he’s beloved by his students, popular with his coworkers, and adored by his proud mother who emigrated from the Congo to the UK in search of a better life. But when he suffers a devastating loss, his life is thrown into a tailspin. As he struggles to find a way forward, memories of his fathers’ violent death, the weight of refugeehood, and an increasing sense of dread threaten everything he’s worked so hard to achieve. Longing to start over, Michael decides to spontaneously pack up and go to America, the mythical “land of the free,” where he imagines everything will be better and easier. On this transformative journey, Michael travels everywhere from New York City to San Francisco, partying with new friends, sparking fleeting romances, and splurging on big adventures, with the intention of living the life of his dreams until the money in his bank account runs out. “Narrated with haunting lyricism, The Selfless Act of Breathing is an intimate journey through the darkest of human impulses to the gleaming flickers of love and radical hope” (Susan Abulhawa, author of Against the Loveless World).

Download or read book Shantytown Kid written by Azouz Begag and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An autobiographical novel of growing up in the multicultural environment of contemporary France tells the story of Azouz Begag, the son of an illiterate Algerian immigrant in Lyon and his coming of age in a world of ethnic and racial tensions.

Download or read book The Boy Who Drew Monsters written by Keith Donohue and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Stolen Child comes a hypnotic literary horror novel about a young boy trapped inside his own world, whose drawings blur the lines between fantasy and reality. Ever since he nearly drowned in the ocean three years earlier, ten-year-old Jack Peter Keenan has been deathly afraid to venture outdoors. Refusing to leave his home in a small coastal town in Maine, Jack Peter spends his time drawing monsters. When those drawings take on a life of their own, no one is safe from the terror they inspire. His mother, Holly, begins to hear strange sounds in the night coming from the ocean, and she seeks answers from the local Catholic priest and his Japanese housekeeper, who fill her head with stories of shipwrecks and ghosts. His father, Tim, wanders the beach, frantically searching for a strange apparition running wild in the dunes. And the boy's only friend, Nick, becomes helplessly entangled in the eerie power of the drawings. While those around Jack Peter are haunted by what they think they see, only he knows the truth behind the frightful occurrences as the outside world encroaches upon them all. In the tradition of The Turn of the Screw, Keith Donohue's The Boy Who Drew Monsters is a mesmerizing tale of psychological terror and imagination run wild, a perfectly creepy read for a dark night.

Download or read book Misfits written by Michaela Coel and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the brilliant mind of Michaela Coel, creator and star of I May Destroy You and Chewing Gum and a Royal Society of Literature fellow, comes a passionate and inspired declaration against fitting in. When invited to deliver the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Michaela Coel touched a lot of people with her striking revelations about race, class and gender, but the person most significantly impacted was Coel herself. Building on her celebrated speech, Misfits immerses readers in her vision through powerful allegory and deeply personal anecdotes—from her coming of age in London public housing to her discovery of theater and her love for storytelling. And she tells of her reckoning with trauma and metamorphosis into a champion for herself, inclusivity, and radical honesty. With inspiring insight and wit, Coel lays bare her journey so far and invites us to reflect on our own. By embracing our differences, she says, we can transform our lives. An artist to her core, Coel holds up the path of the creative as an emblem of our need to regard one another with care and respect—and transparency. Misfits is a triumphant call for honesty, empathy and inclusion. Championing “misfits” everywhere, this timely, necessary book is a rousing coming-to-power manifesto dedicated to anyone who has ever worried about fitting in.

Download or read book The Dry Heart written by Natalia Ginzburg and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg's writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don't more wives kill their husbands?

Download or read book Consent written by Vanessa Springora and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Consent” is a Molotov cocktail, flung at the face of the French establishment, a work of dazzling, highly controlled fury...By every conceivable metric, her book is a triumph.” -- The New York Times Already an international literary sensation, an intimate and powerful memoir of a young French teenage girl’s relationship with a famous, much older male writer—a universal #MeToo story of power, manipulation, trauma, recovery, and resiliency that exposes the hypocrisy of a culture that has allowed the sexual abuse of minors to occur unchecked. Sometimes, all it takes is a single voice to shatter the silence of complicity. Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of the country’s most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of a very influential man in the French literary world. At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Vanessa, now in her forties and the director of one of France’s leading publishing houses, decided to reclaim her own story, offering her perspective of those events sharply known. Consent is the story of one precocious young girl’s stolen adolescence. Devastating in its honesty, Vanessa’s painstakingly memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a thirteen-year-old girl to become involved with a fifty-year-old man who happened to be a notable writer. As she recalls the events of her childhood and her seduction by one of her country’s most notable writers, Vanessa reflects on the ways in which this disturbing relationship changed and affected her as she grew older. Drawing parallels between children’s fairy tales and French history and her personal life, Vanessa offers an intimate and absorbing look at the meaning of love and consent and the toll of trauma and the power of healing in women’s lives. Ultimately, she offers a forceful indictment of a chauvinistic literary world that has for too long accepted and helped perpetuate gender inequality and the exploitation and sexual abuse of children. Translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer "...One of the belated truths that emerges from [Consent] is that Springora is a writer. [...]Her sentences gleam like metal; each chapter snaps shut with the clean brutality of a latch." -- The New Yorker "Consent [is] rapier-sharp, written with restraint, elegance and brevity." -- The Times (London) "[Consent] has something steely in its heart, and it departs from the typical American memoir of childhood abuse in exhilarating ways." -- Slate "Lucid and nuanced...[Consent] will speak to trauma survivors everywhere." -- Los Angeles Review of Books ”A piercing memoir about the sexually abusive relationship she endured at age 14 with a 50-year-old writer...This chilling account will linger with readers long after the last page is turned.” -- Publishers Weekly "Springora's lucid account is a commanding discussion of sexual abuse and victimization, and a powerful act of reclamation." -- Booklist "A chilling story of child abuse and the sophisticated Parisians who looked the other way...[Springora] is an elegant and perceptive writer." -- Kirkus

Download or read book Bar Balto written by Faiza Guéne and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-01-13 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joël, aka 'The Rink' (because his bald patch is shiny enough to skate on), the unpopular owner of the only bar in town has been murdered. There are so many suspects, it's not so much a question of who did kill him as who didn't. There's Magalie, the temperamental teenager obsessed with Paris Hilton; her troublemaker boyfriend, Tani; Tani's mother, Madame Levi; her unemployed, daytime-TV addicted husband; Yeznig, their younger son, who has learning difficulties but perfect memory recall; and newcomers Ali and Nadia, the Muslim twins struggling to fit in. As the tension mounts and we're still none the wiser, the ending is as tragic as it is unexpected.

Download or read book The Book of Unknown Americans written by Cristina Henríquez and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning novel of hopes and dreams, guilt and love—a book that offers a resonant new definition of what it means to be American and "illuminates the lives behind the current debates about Latino immigration" (The New York Times Book Review). When fifteen-year-old Maribel Rivera sustains a terrible injury, the Riveras leave behind a comfortable life in Mexico and risk everything to come to the United States so that Maribel can have the care she needs. Once they arrive, it’s not long before Maribel attracts the attention of Mayor Toro, the son of one of their new neighbors, who sees a kindred spirit in this beautiful, damaged outsider. Their love story sets in motion events that will have profound repercussions for everyone involved. Here Henríquez seamlessly interweaves the story of these star-crossed lovers, and of the Rivera and Toro families, with the testimonials of men and women who have come to the United States from all over Latin America.

Download or read book Guapa written by Saleem Haddad and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A debut novel that tells the story of Rasa, a young gay man coming of age in the Middle East Set over the course of twenty-four hours, Guapa follows Rasa, a gay man living in an unnamed Arab country, as he tries to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and social upheaval. Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa's grandmother — the woman who raised him — catches them in bed together. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar, Guapa, who has been arrested by the police. Ashamed to go home and face his grandmother, and reeling from the potential loss of the three most important people in his life, Rasa roams the city’s slums and prisons, the lavish weddings of the country’s elite, and the bars where outcasts and intellectuals drink to a long-lost revolution. Each new encounter leads him closer to confronting his own identity, as he revisits his childhood and probes the secrets that haunt his family. As Rasa confronts the simultaneous collapse of political hope and his closest personal relationships, he is forced to discover the roots of his alienation and try to re-emerge into a society that may never accept him.

Download or read book Terraformed written by Joy White and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An uncompromising wake-up call. Joy White tells uncomfortable truths and blows apart our understanding of racism, crime and policing in our inner-cities. Since the 1980s, austerity, gentrification and structural racism have wreaked havoc on inner-city communities, widening inequality and entrenching poverty. In Terraformed, Joy White offers an insiders view of Forest Gate -- an urban neighbourhood in London -- analysing how these issues affect the black youth of today. Connecting the dots between music, politics and the built environment, it centres on the lived experiences of black youth who have had it all: huge student debt, invisible homelessness, custodial sentences, electronic tagging, surveillance, arrest, police brutality, issues with health and well-being, and of course, loss. Part ethnography, part memoir, Terraformed uses the history of Newham, London as an example of inner-city life across the globe and considers how young black lives are affected by racism, capitalism and austerity.