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.
Translated from Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
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.
BIO
Ondjaki was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1977. He studied in Lisbon, Portugal, and is the author of five novels, three short story collections, and various books of poems and stories for children. He has also made a documentary film, May Cherries Grow, about his native city. His books have been translated into eight languages and have earned him major literary prizes in Angola, Portugal, France, and Brazil. In 2008, Ondjaki was awarded the Grinzane for Africa Prize in the category of Best Young Writer. In 2012, the Guardian named him one of its Top Five African Writers.
REVIEWS
"Miller-Lachmann does a remarkable job of making this rich piece accessible to an English-language readership. Ondjaki's poetic prose draws an achingly potent picture of two young people reaching for each other during a sudden moment of possibility, while the white text on the black pages and Gonçalves' rough, white-on-black illustrations help create an immersive experience. As the best art does, this collaboration makes a very specific story--two young people, one night--feel universal. A brilliantly elemental exploration of the light that darkness can bring." -- Kirkus Reviews
[H] Unruly/Enchanted Lion / September 03, 2024
126 pages