A haunting, beautiful first novel by the bestselling author of A Long Way Gone When Ishmael Beah?s A Long Way Gone was published in 2007, it soared to the top of bestseller lists, becoming an instant classic: a harrowing account of Sierra Leone?s civil war and the fate of child soldiers that...  more

A haunting, beautiful first novel by the bestselling author of A Long Way Gone When Ishmael Beah?s A Long Way Gone was published in 2007, it soared to the top of bestseller lists, becoming an instant classic: a harrowing account of Sierra Leone?s civil war and the fate of child soldiers that ?everyone in the world should read? (The Washington Post). Now Beah, whom Dave Eggers has called ?arguably the most read African writer in contemporary literature,? has returned with his first novel, an affecting, tender parable about postwar life in Sierra Leone.At the center of Radiance of Tomorrow are Benjamin and Bockarie, two longtime friends who return to their hometown, Imperi, after the civil war. The village is in ruins, the ground covered in bones. As more villagers begin to come back, Benjamin and Bockarie try to forge a new community by taking up their former posts as teachers, but they?re beset by obstacles: a scarcity of food; a rash of murders, thievery, rape, and retaliation; and the depredations of a foreign mining company intent on sullying the town?s water supply and blocking its paths with electric wires. As Benjamin and Bockarie search for a way to restore order, they?re forced to reckon with the uncertainty of their past and future alike.With the gentle lyricism of a dream and the moral clarity of a fable, Radiance of Tomorrow is a powerful novel about preserving what means the most to us, even in uncertain times.

In his most extraordinary book, ?one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century? (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks?s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the...  more

In his most extraordinary book, ?one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century? (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks?s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; patients no longer able to recognize people and common objects; patients stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; patients whose limbs have become alien; patients who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks?s splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine?s ultimate responsibility: ?the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject.?