Search results for ""Author Biyi Bandele""

A few months ago fourteen-year-old Ali Banana was apprenticed to a whip-wielding blacksmith in his rural hometown. Now its winter 1944, the war is entering its most crucial stage and Ali is a private in Thunder Brigade. His unit has been given orders to go behind enemy lines and wreak havoc. But the Burmese jungle is a mud-riven, treacherous place, riddled with Japanese snipers, insanity and disease. Burma Boy is a horrific, vividly realised account of the madness, the sacrifice and the dark humour of the Second World War's most vicious battleground. It's also the moving story of a boy trying to live long enough to become a man.

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''A true artist. A brilliant writer. An original thinker'' Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieYorùbá Boy Running charts Samuel Ajayi Crowther''s miraculous journey from slave to liberator, boy to man, running to resisting''Run, Àjàyí, run!''The day the Malian slave traders invaded the Nigerian town of Òsogùn, thirteen-year-old Àjàyí''s life was split in two.Before, there was his childhood, surrounded by friends and family, watched over by the ancient Yorùbá gods of forest and water, earth and sky. After: capture, slavery - and release, into the service of a new god, his own culture left far behind. So Àjàyí becomes Samuel Crowther - missionary, linguist, minister - and abolitionist: driven to negotiate against his own people to end the miserable trade in human beings which destroyed his family.Drawing on the prolific writings of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, Biyi Bándélé has created a many-voiced, kaleidoscopic portrait of an extraordinary

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