Saturday’s Shadows

Ayesha Harruna Attah

“An evocative and bright novel where stories of family and country intersect in textured landscapes of upheaval, hope, and desire. Saturday’s Shadows is at once familiar and fresh, a compelling offering from a  sensitive writer.” Author, NoViolet Bulawayo

Saturday’s Shadows is based in a West African country at the  end of a 17 year military dictatorship. It weaves the stories of four members of the Avoka household, where everybody is lurching toward self destruction. The father, Theo, is recruited to write the memoirs of the dictator turned president whom he loathes. Zahra, matriarch of the house, rekindles an affair with an old lover and barely keeps her family and sanity together. Theo and Zahra’s son Kojo has just started the boarding school of his dreams but finds out it’s nothing like he imagined. Their new help, Atsu, recently transplanted from the village, struggles to understand the eccentricities of her new family. Saturday’s Shadows is a novel about the slow, yet unpredictable implosion of a marriage, it is also a tale of love and devotion, as well as a study in the psychology of tyrants and how their rule destroys not only their subjects but themselves.

Saturday’s Shadow is a glittering novel from one of Africa’s ascendant literary stars. It is one of four novels launching the new imprint World Editions

• Such is the dexterity of Ayesha Harruna Attah – she melds and merges disparate topics and issues into a coherent and palatable narrative whole with muscular and vibrant storytelling.

  Mohammed Nassehu-Ali, author of The Prophet of Zongo Street