Siddhartha Deb0.0 From leadership seminars in fancy hotels to medieval figures walking from town to town looking for work in small town factories; from the naive waitresses working in the mecca of five star hotels to farmers struggling to grow the right crops for the 21st century, Siddhartha Deb's book is the riveting, moving, darkly comic, brilliantly told story of modern India. With the novelist's vision, reminiscent of V.S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness, combined with the modern narrative force of Maximum City, Deb's account paints a portrait of this country in turmoil through the story of its people: aspiring and deluded, desperate and hopeful, beautiful and damned.
Хелон Хабила0.0 "The new generation of twenty-first-century African writers have now come of age. Without a doubt Habila is one of the best." —Emmanuel Dongala
In the oil-rich and environmentally devastated Nigerian Delta, the wife of a British oil executive has been kidnapped. Two journalists-a young upstart, Rufus, and a once-great, now disillusioned veteran, Zaq-are sent to find her. In a story rich with atmosphere and taut with suspense, Oil on Water explores the conflict between idealism and cynical disillusionment in a journey full of danger and unintended consequences.
As Rufus and Zaq navigate polluted rivers flanked by exploded and dormant oil wells, in search of "the white woman," they must contend with the brutality of both government soldiers and militants. Assailed by irresolvable versions of the "truth" about the woman's disappearance, dependent on the kindness of strangers of unknowable loyalties, their journalistic objectivity will prove unsustainable, but other values might yet salvage their human dignity.
