$16.99
‘A storm blew in from paradise. That storm was life.’
P’s greatest dream is to fly. While training to become a Ugandan fighter pilot in an academy outside Athens, the 1971 Idi Amin coup in his homeland, Uganda, disrupts his plans. He defects and becomes a man on the run. In this extraordinary novel based on his own father’s fate, Anyuru evokes P’s struggles in gorgeous, vivid prose. As a refugee, as a military-camp prisoner, and as an exile, P never gives up hope and continues to dream of a life as a pilot. Told across two generations in a language that simmers with lyrical longing, this search for identity and purpose soars from a world in which nowhere is home.
Translator | |
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Genre | |
Pages | 252 |
Paperback ISBN | 978-1-64286-044-3 |
Ebook ISBN | 978-1-64286-051-1 |
Region | |
Publication date | November 5, 2019 |
Price | $16.99 |
Johannes Anyuru (Sweden, 1979), the son of a Ugandan father and a Swedish mother, is a novelist and poet. A Storm Blew in from Paradise enjoyed immense success… Read more
“[A Storm Blew in from Paradise] is a tour de force of significant talent and deceptively understated craft in every paragraph and on every page. Written in easy, quiet diction and register, with painstaking attentiveness to the beauty and richness of literary language, it is an unblinking exploration of suffering, isolation, and physical and mental pain…Johannes Anyuru’s novel takes pains to gesture at the crisis of the survival of not just refugees and postcolonial migrants, but for the Anthropocene.”
—Nandini Bhattacharya, The Literary Review
“A deeply moving meditation on identity and history, the personal and the political, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews
“While a resilient human can be broken, resilience itself can’t….a lesson that comes across clearly in Anyuru’s effective debut novel.” —Rain Taxi
“Anyuru’s searingly poetic style rescues his writing from bleakness and sentimentality alike as he confronts the lies we live by.” —The Independent
“A tense, sparse re-telling of a life. This novel is a shining example of literature’s ability to give its readers a new perspective on the world, and an excellent way to learn about the emotional consequences of war and exile. I can honestly say that A Storm Blew in from Paradise is the best Swedish novel I have read in a long time. I would advise anyone interested in the writing process, in familial and national ties, in pain, healing, loss and rediscovery to read it.” —Swedish Book Review
“A strikingly beautiful text pierced with today’s doubts and theories about what creates true meaning in the life story of a single human being, as well as in history. This is a personal and universal novel about fatherlessness and identity, about the power of violence and about how we are all prisoners of time.” —Aftonbladet
“Johannes Anyuru’s language hurls itself, like the main character of this book, straight into the sun, burning and scorching.” —Helsingborgs Dagblad