Our Beautiful Darkness
Translated from Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
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 António Jorge Gonçalves.
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.
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Book Dimensions: 14.22 cm, 2.03 cm, 21.84 cm
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