Dreams in a Time of War
  • Published: 15 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099548522
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $32.99
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Dreams in a Time of War

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1 Jul 2010
Paperback
15 Mar 2011
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A powerful memoir of an extraordinary Kenyan childhood by an widely celebrated international author.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born the fifth child of his father's third wife, in a family that includes twenty-four children born to four different mothers. He spent his 1930s childhood as the apple of his mother's eye, before attending school to slake what is considered a bizarre thirst for learning.

As he grows up, the wider political and social changes occurring in Kenya begin to impinge on the boy's life in both inspiring and frightening ways. Through the story of his grandparents and parents, and his brothers' involvement in the violent Mau Mau uprising, Ngugi deftly etches a tumultuous era, capturing the landscape, the people and their culture, and the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war.
  • Published: 15 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099548522
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of the leading writers and scholars at work in the world today. His books include the novels Petals of Blood, for which he was imprisoned by the Kenyan government in 1977, A Grain of Wheat and Wizard of the Crow; the memoirs, Dreams in a Time of War, In the House of the Interpreter and Birth of a Dream Weaver; and the essays, Decolonizing the Mind, Something Torn and New and Globalectics. Recipient of many honours, among them ten honorary doctorates, he is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

portrait photo of Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Also by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Petals of Blood
Devil on the Cross
The Perfect Nine
Secret Lives & Other Stories
Wrestling with the Devil
Birth of a Dream Weaver
In the House of the Interpreter
See all

Praise for Dreams in a Time of War

In his crowded career and his eventful life, Ngugi has enacted, for all to see, the paradigmatic trials and quandaries of a contemporary African writer caught in sometimes implacable political, social, racial, and linguistic currents

John Updike, The New Yorker

Delicate, fresh and scrupulously honest...calm and mature

Spectator

Moving, honest and informative, this is a book about the influence of stories, storytelling and storytellers. It is a reminder that every generation, however beleaguered, can dream to change the world

Independent

The work he offers us here is like nothing that's gone before: it is the chronicle of a child's single-minded pursuit of an education.... The picture of Kenya that he presents is admirably free of cant or sentimentality, and yet it is enough to make you weep

Washington Post

Ngugi has returned to his roots to produce something delicate, fresh and scrupulously honest

Michela Wrong, The Spectator

The surprise about Dreams in a Time of War is that, for all the provocation of history, and for all its clear-eyed evocation of an agonised time, it is not an angry book ... Ngugi's storyteller's instinct for character and place, for recurring motifs and telling symbols, triumphs over the bleakness of background...this memoir is a tale of triumph

Mary Crockett, The Scotsman

Essential reading for the author's many admirers

Michael Holman, Literary Review

Ngugi's storytelling skills never falter as he brings this far-away world vividly to life

Metro

Absorbing personal reflections that illuminate not just later careers, but the state of their peoples too.

Boyd Tonkin, Independent, Christmas round up

One of Kenya's greatest storytellers

James Urquhart, Financial Times