Saturday’s Shadows is based in a West African country at the end of a 17 year military dictatorship. It weaves the stories of four members of the Avoka household, where everybody is lurching toward self destruction. The father, Theo, is recruited to write the memoirs of the dictator turned president whom he loathes. Zahra, matriarch of the house, rekindles an affair with an old lover and barely keeps her family and sanity together. Theo and Zahra’s son Kojo has just started the boarding school of his dreams but finds out it’s nothing like he imagined. Their new help, Atsu, recently transplanted from the village, struggles to understand the eccentricities of her new family. This multi-voiced novel not only paints a picture of these tumultuous changes, but also shows that tenderness can persist even when everything else is being torn apart.