ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
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Decoloniser of the mind
Jenny Farrell pays tribute to the work of the great African writer NGUGI WA THIONG’O and his incisive Marxist analysis of the continent, past and present
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
KENYAN-BORN writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who turned 80 this year, is nothing if not prolific. His first major novel Weep Not Child (1964) was followed by The River Between with its background of the Mau Mau war of independence, which he had witnessed, and A Grain of Wheat (1967).
He has gone on to write many plays, fiction, essays and memoirs, with his 1986 book Decolonising the Mind about the constructive role of language in Africa's national cultures, history and identity arguably his most significant.
For 10 years from 1977, Ngugi was a lecturer in the English literature department at the University of Nairobi where, to reflect a change of focus from English to world literature, he campaigned for the change of its name to simply the literature department.
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