Aftershocks

Dispatches from the Frontlines of Identity

By: Nadia Owusu

Narrated by: Nadia Owusu

Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

I have lived in disaster and disaster has lived in me. Our shared languages are thunder and reverberation.

When Nadia Owusu was two years old her mother abandoned her and her baby sister and fled from Tanzania back to the US. When she was 13 her beloved Ghanaian father died of cancer. She and her sister were left alone, with a stepmother they didn't like, adrift.

Nadia Owusu is a woman of many languages, homelands and identities. She grew up in Rome, Dar-es-Salaam, Addis Ababa, Kumasi, Kampala and London. And for every new place there was a new language, a new identity and a new home. At times she has felt stateless, motherless and identity-less. At others, she has had multiple identities at war within her. It's no wonder she started to feel fault lines in her sense of self. It's no wonder that those fault lines eventually ruptured.

Aftershocks is the account of how she hauled herself out of the wreckage. It is the intimate story behind the news of immigration and division dominating contemporary politics. Nadia Owusu's astonishingly moving and incredibly timely memoir is a nuanced portrait of globalisation from the inside in a fractured world in crisis.

©2021 Nadia Owusu (P)2021 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Nadia’s voice while reading the book

Aftershocks by @wheresnadia

“The earthquake came and destroyed their homes, their city. On the same day, my mother came, and her coming toppled me. My mother became the earthquake. I was only seven.”

She begins by describing a visit her mother made to her in Rome at the age of seven.... or rather, her mother leaving after this short visit. She likens the experience, and her mother, to an earthquake. And everything that follows is the result of that earthquake, the aftershocks reverberating throughout her life.

“I asked my father what an aftershock was. He said they are tremors in the earth that follow an earthquake. They are the earth’s delayed reaction to stress.”

With prose so beautiful and delicious, Nadia describes her life - the good, the bad, the ugly. She lays everything bare. As you read the book, you are an insider and not an onlooker. She writes so intimately that you want to hold her close.

“An earthquake is trauma and vulnerability: the earth’s, mine, yours.”

I cannot get over the writing! The writing is so delicious, so lush, so incredibly nummy! The writing is so ridiculously peng, powerful and ravishing.

Aftershocks is a masterclass in writing, vulnerability and honestly.

Aftershocks is a must have in your library