Shopping Cart

Sirena Selena (Picador USA Pbk)

Paperback

We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price. Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

This is a cookie agreement request — you can customize it or disable on the backoffice. Cookies help us to provide you the best experience using our website.

Do you like any template? Apply its settings to your store — just select the template you like and press the «Apply» button of the desirable one. Templates can be switched at any time.
Applying a new template overrides the settings. Press «Copy» and paste it into any text file to save your current settings.

Export

Import

Import

x