Ghana Reader With Love From Mom

Whether through her stories or her legendary readings, J. California Cooper has an uncanny ability to reach out to readers like an old and dear friend. Her characters are plain-spoken and direct: simple people for whom life, despite its ever-present struggles, is always worth the journey. In Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime, Cooper's characteristic themes of romance, heartbreak, struggle and faith resonate. We meet Darlin, a self-proclaimed femme fatale who uses her wiles to try to find a husband; MLee, whose life seems to be coming to an end at the age of forty until she decides to set out and see if she can make a new life for herself; Kissy and Buddy, both trying and failing to find them until they finally meet each other; and Aberdeen, whose daughter Uniqua shows her how to educate herself and move up in the world. These characters and others offer inspiration, laughter, instruction and pure enjoyment in what is one of J. California Cooper's finest story collections.

'Engrossing and memorable' Ben Okri 'Meditative, gestural, philosophic: a brave reinvention of the immigrant narrative ... Unprecedented' Taiye Selasi 'I read this novel very slowly. I didn't want to miss anything ... It is a rich, beautiful book and when I got to the end, I wanted to start again' Chibundu Onuzo Maya grows up in Germany knowing that her parents are different: from one another, and from the rest of the world. Her reserved, studious father is distant; and her beautiful, volatile mother is a whirlwind, with a penchant for lavish shopping sprees and a mesmerising power for spinning stories of the family's former glory – of what was had, and what was lost. And then Kojo arrives one Christmas, like an annunciation: Maya's cousin, and her mother's godson. Kojo has a way with words – a way of talking about Ghana, and empire, and what happens when a country's treasures are spirited away by colonialists. For the first time, Maya has someone who can help her understand why exile has made her parents the way they are. But then Maya and Kojo are separated, shuttled off to school in England, where they come face to face with the maddening rituals of Empire. Returning to Ghana as a young woman, Maya is reunited with her powerful but increasingly troubled cousin. Her homecoming will set off an exorcism of their family and country's strangest, darkest demons. It is in this destruction's wake that Maya realises her own purpose: to tell the story of her mother, her cousin, their land and their loss, on her own terms, in her own voice.

A dramatic and thought-provoking novel of one family's triumph in the face of the hardships and challenges of the post-Civil War South. The Wake of the Wind, J. California Cooper's third novel, is her most penetrating look yet at the challenges that generations of African Americans have had to overcome in order to carve out a home for themselves and their families. Set in Texas in the waning years of the Civil War, the novel tells the dramatic story of a remarkable heroine, Lifee, and her husband, Mor. When Emancipation finally comes to Texas, Mor, Lifee, and the extended family they create from other slaves who are also looking for a home and a future, set out in search of a piece of land they can call their own. In the face of constant threats, they manage not only to survive but to succeed--their crops grow, their children thrive, they educate themselves and others. Lifee and Mor pass their intelligence, determination, and talents along to their children, the next generation to surge forward. At once tragic and triumphant, this is an epic story that captures with extraordinary authenticity the most important struggle of the last hundred years.

Pranab Chakraborty was a fellow Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the shores of Central Square. Soon he was one of the family. From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, a staggeringly beautiful and precise story about a Bengali family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the impossibilities of love, and the unanticipated pleasures and complications of life in America. “Hell-Heaven” is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ode to the intimate secrets of closest kin, from the acclaimed collection Unaccustomed Earth. An eBook short.

Hilda and Kirt Bromley have set up fifty-three libraries in rural communities in Ghana, West Africa. Responding to a call from the Lord, the Bromleys trusted in Him to provide. They set up a nonprofit organization, collected books, raised funds for shipping, and then traveled to Ghana to meet with local communities to help set up their libraries. The Bromleys view the work as a mission from God to provide opportunities for people in rural areas where textbooks and educational resources are very limited. “The Glory of God is the person fully alive” is the motto of Books for Africa Library Project. This book relates the experiences of this mission from its inception in 1996 to the present time, working with rural communities setting up libraries. There are also stories of Hilda’s childhood in the British colony of the Gold Coast, her youth as a national runner honored by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, her intercultural marriage with Kirt, and their work with AA and Al-Anon in Ghana. Their stories relate the faithfulness of God from the time when the Lord first spoke to Hilda, “Go build Me a library in Kukurantumi.”

This book provides balanced critical linguistic and literary representations of gender and power relations in Ghanaian and Nigerian texts, contrary to most existing literary and linguistic studies on gender that have either focused on male chauvinism or male emasculation. This text provides novel insight into gender dynamics, liberation and empowerment especially as it relates to language and power in Africa.

Do your family dinners happen in more than one language? Do you celebrate Christmas and Eid? Do you and your family feel at home in more than one country? If so, then you may be a MOLA Family and yes, this multicultural, multilingual, mobile life can get a little 'messy.' In South America, a mola is a shirt made from intricately stitched layers of patterns and cloth. Worn with pride, it represents who you are - inside and out. Mariam Ottimofiore presents a mola as the perfect metaphor for globally mobile families living between cultures, countries, languages, nationalities, identities and homes, who find their story hard to articulate. She has created the MOLA tool to help global families design and show their stories to the world. This is your 'life by design.' Pakistan-born Mariam is a writer, researcher and expatriate family specialist who grew up and lived in nine countries. Her husband is German/Italian and together they have raised their children in Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Raw, honest, inspiring and uplifting, This Messy Mobile Life comprises personal reflection, expert advice and survey research to help you take your global family from mess to mola.