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Masterful in its examination of freedom, prejudice, and personal and public inheritance, Sankofa is a story for anyone who has ever gone looking for a clear identity or home, and found something more complex in its place.

Anna is at a stage of her life when she is beginning to wonder who she really is. She has separated from her husband, her daughter is all grown up, and her mother—the only parent who raised her—is dead.

Searching through her mother’s belongings one day, Anna finds clues about the African father she never knew. His student diaries chronicle his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London. Anna discovers that he eventually became the president—some would say dictator—of a small nation in West Africa. And he is still alive…

When Anna decides to track her father down, a journey begins that is disarmingly moving, funny, and fascinating. Like the metaphorical bird that gives the novel its name, Sankofa expresses the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present to address universal questions of race and belonging, the overseas experience for the African diaspora, and the search for a family’s hidden roots.

Nice—real name, Theresa—has just arrived Nairobi airport where she will be picked up by her old friend, Duncan, an American pastor for a small evangelical denomination. Duncan cannot know that Nice is fleeing her life choices, and her UN job in Mogadishu. She believes she is too innocent-looking, too nice, for anyone to suspect that she is muling drugs.

But Nice has not contended with her drug-dealer Somali boyfriend having an associate in the Kenya Police Service. Duncan’s car crashes on the way back from the airport.

Duncan awakes after the car crash, to find himself captive to the sociopathic policeman, Hinga, and the charmingly amoral Ciru. Nice is gone. Plucked from his expat bubble, Duncan must plunge into the moral complexities of the under-city to get Nice back. But how deep can Duncan go, without destroying his faith, and himself?