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Our Beautiful Darkness book cover
Our Beautiful Darkness
A Graphic Novel
2024
First Published
3.69
Average Rating
126
Number of Pages
A blackout leads two teens to discover the intimacy and vulnerability that can only be shared in darkness in Our Beautiful Darkness, a fully illustrated YA novella from celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki and illustrator Ant ó nio Jorge Gon ç alves . Translated from Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann The light goes out suddenly. And in this absence of light, a pair of teenagers bare their souls. Into the warm silence of the night, they share a conversation filled with their stories and dreams… and maybe even a first kiss. Set against the backdrop of the civil war that ravaged Angola in the 1990s, this book weaves the country’s history with a teenage boy’s family stories. But when a power outage shrouds the neighborhood in darkness, everyday realities fade away… As the boy and a girl sit talking in the backyard, memory gives way to imagination and vulnerability, and the space between them becomes charged with emotional electricity. Their resulting conversation is both a meditation on the storytelling impulse and a gripping narrative of first love that, through its particulars, ascends to the universal.
Avg Rating
3.69
Number of Ratings
127
5 STARS
19%
4 STARS
39%
3 STARS
34%
2 STARS
7%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

Ondjaki
Ondjaki
Author · 19 books

Ndalu de Almeida (born 1977) is a writer from Angola, writing under the pen name Ondjaki. He lives in Luanda, the capital of the country, and has written poetry, children's books, short stories, novels, drama and film scripts. Ondjaki studied sociology at the University of Lisbon, and wrote his graduation paper about Angolan writer Luandino Vieira. His literary debut came in 2002 with the novella O Assobiador (The Whistler), which was followed up with the childhood memoir Bom dia camaradas (Good Morning, Comrades) in 2003. To date (2010) he has published four novels, three collections of short stories, two collections of poetry and three children's books. His books have been translated to French, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Chinese and Swedish Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ondjaki Ondjaki was born in Luanda in 1977. He completed his degree in Sociology in Lisbon in 2002 with a study on the great Angolan writer Luandino Vieira. A versatile young talent and a most promising writer of the Portuguese language in Africa, he has already had paintings exhibited, given public performances as an actor, as well as published his own poems and novels. Ondjaki has been awarded the Grande Prémio de Conto Camilo Castelo Branco 2008 by the Portuguese Writers' Association for his novel Os da Minha Rua. In 2008 he was distinguished with the Grinzane for Africa award, in the category of young writer, and recently, Ondjaki has won the prestigious Jabuti Prize 2010 with his juvenile book AvóDezanove e o Segredo do Soviético. Source: http://www.mertin-litag.de/authors\_ht...

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