Nominiert: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, 2022.Nominiert: ASLE-UKI Book Prize (creative writing), 2023

A generation of narrative voices, many of them children, shape this sweeping, elegiac story of capitalism, colonialism and boundless greed, reminding us of the myriad ways we fail to make a better world for our children

Vorwort
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers comes a sweeping story about the collision of a small African village and an American oil company

Autorentext
Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Blue Metropolis Words to Change Prize and was an Oprah's Book Club selection. Named a notable book of the year by the Observer, New York Times and the Washington Post and a best book of the year by close to a dozen publications, the novel has been translated into eleven languages, adapted into an opera and a stage play, and has been optioned for film. A native of Limbe, Cameroon and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia universities, Imbolo Mbue lives in New York City. imbolombue.com

Klappentext

'Sweeping and quietly devastating' New York Times
**'A David and Goliath story for our times' O, the Oprah Magazine
**
Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations are made - and ignored. The country's government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest only. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. But their fight will come at a steep price . . . one which generation after generation will have to pay.

Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community's determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman's willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people's freedom.

Zusammenfassung
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers comes a sweeping story about the collision of a small African village and an American oil company