A Grain of Wheat
by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Independence week. Everyone's keeping a secret.
For you if
you want to understand what the Mau Mau rebellion actually cost the people who fought it
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Four days before Kenyan independence in 1963, a village prepares to celebrate — and everyone in it is carrying a betrayal. Ngũgĩ structures the novel like a series of confessions, moving between the present and the Mau Mau years, slowly revealing what people did to survive colonialism and what that survival cost them. The most politically mature Kenyan novel ever written. A dispatch about the gap between the story a liberation movement tells about itself and the messier truth of how people actually behave under impossible pressure.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Kenya • East Africa
- Voice
- Written by a Kenyan author
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