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    By Night the Mountain Burns
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    By Night the Mountain Burns
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    By Night the Mountain Burns
    Ebook251 pages5 hours

    By Night the Mountain Burns

    By Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    By Night the Mountain Burns recounts the narrator's childhood on a remote island off the West African coast, living with his mysterious grandfather, several mothers and no fathers. We learn of a dark chapter in the island's history: a bush fire destroys the crops, then hundreds perish in a cholera outbreak. Superstition dominates, and the islanders must sacrifice their possessions to the enraged ocean god. What of their lives will they manage to save? Whitmanesque in its lyrical evocation of the island, Ávila Laurel's writing builds quietly, through the oral rhythms of traditional storytelling, into gripping drama worthy of an Achebe or a García Márquez.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnd Other Stories
    Release dateNov 6, 2014
    ISBN9781908276414
    Unavailable
    By Night the Mountain Burns
    Author

    Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel

    Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel was born in 1966 in Equatorial Guinea. The Gurugu Pledge is his second novel to appear in English, and follows his 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-shortlisted debut By Night The Mountain Burns, which was based on his memories of growing up on the remote island of Annobón. He made headlines in 2011 by embarking on a hunger strike, in an anti-government protest. He now lives exiled in Barcelona.

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    Reviews for By Night the Mountain Burns

    4/5

    18 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is a difficult book - not to read - the translation and the story flowed easily for all the desolate power of its fiction but to attempt to assimilate - there are more questions than answers here and I've lost countless hrs since reading this in an attempt to learn more of Annobón / pagalu.

      This story took me right on to reading human rights reports and country histories, to trying to piece them together w my own knowledge of today into a sort of reader's next step after.

      - the author, with the voice of a child, the distance of adulthood and new freedoms evokes a powerful need to know
    • 4/5
      The story of a boy growing up on a remote island somewhere to the west of Africa (?), and living through a number of major events including a cholera epidemic, various superstitions, a massive fire, violence within the community and the other tragedies of people living a subsidence lifestyle. It is not happy reading, but the story is well told and since it is through the eyes of a child, does not have the heaviness that it might.
    • 5/5
      Other reviews can tell you what the book is about, this one is a piece of advice: This novel starts slowly and you might be tempted to put it down. It feels disorganized and repetitive, as if it might not be going anywhere. Stick with it. Those circumlocutions are part of the story and help make it unlike any novel I've read. This is beautiful, mysterious, horribly cruel, then beautiful again. It may take more time to get into this novel than most others, but you'll be rewarded.

      1 person found this helpful