Arlington Reads: Imbolo Mbue in Conversation with Diane Kresh
An Arlington Reads Signature Author Event.
Join us online for a conversation between novelist Imbolo Mbue and Library Director Diane Kresh about Mbue's book "How Beautiful We Were." This event is sponsored by the Ballston BID, which will be raffling off gift cards to Ballston Quarter.
About the book:
From the celebrated author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers comes a sweeping, wrenching story about the collision of a small African village and an American oil company. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price.
Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, 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 on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
About the Author
Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been translated into eleven languages, adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a miniseries. Her new novel, How Beautiful We Were, is about what happened when a fictional African village decided to fight against an against American oil company that had been polluting its land for many years. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York.
Watch on Arlington Public Library's Youtube channel, where you can enter to win a free copy of Mbue's book!
RSVP for an event reminder.
- Date:
- Thursday, December 9, 2021
- Time:
- 7:00pm - 8:00pm
- Categories:
- Artist Talk
- Calendar:
- Arlington Public Library