Mandy Sutter

Bush Meat (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

For Sarah's family, memories of early Sixties Aba in south-eastern Nigeria are scorched onto their hearts. A days-old burial mound exposed as an 'exploded diagram' of bones picked clean by beasts. Adaku the Barbary duck with a 'melted face', who was conscripted into friendship by six-year-old Sarah in the first of a lifetime's unlikely alliances, forged by necessity and relocation. The narcotic puff let out from the freezer in the meat-man's shack off the Ikot Ekpene road, where Maureen, Sarah's lonely mother, gave up aspirations to be a 'proper oil company wife' to Jim, and risked buying 'bush meat'. The dry 'snakeskin' bark of the old iroko tree on the bend of the town's river, under whose shade Jim sought sanctuary from people, and whose 'two long white catkins the tree one day bestowed onto his head like confetti.' Back home, Jim swaps adventure and agency for woodwork and more whisky. Maureen, denying her love of Igbo crafts and cloth, considers reinventing herself as an Oxfam shop assistant. In the days before her grandmother's funeral, Sarah finds the platitudes of her father evasive compared to the wisdom and ritual taught by servant Chidike while burying the household monkey. Sarah's hard-won Nigerian barter goods, a silver thumb-ring and a dare taken to eat fried-fat market 'snack', become devalued. At Aba's Sancta Maria, unaccustomed food was a cone of hot roast groundnuts paid for by a penny with a hole. In Britain, 'unaccustomed' means milk with a 'thickened band of yellow'. Now, the currency is a dare Sarah first honours, then refuses. As people of that time and place are scattered like those bleached bones, Aba acts as centripetal force on their imagination. Today's city was a small town the like of which Tim Winton gnaws at from different angles in The Turning. Mandy Sutter's approach is similarly innovative. Her themes are substitution, racism, and whether the spirit can ever survive transaction.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Parthian Books
• Seitenzahl: 228
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. August 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781917140133
• Artikelnr.: 73634085

Autorenporträt

Mandy Sutter went to school in Nigeria and Bromley but now lives in Yorkshire with her partner and a large black dog called Fable. She has co-written two non-fiction books about the lives of Somali women. Her first novel, Stretching It, was published in 2013, her third poetry pamphlet, Old Blue Car, in 2015. She won first prize in the New Welsh Writing Awards in 2016 for this novel's opening chapter, 'Bush Meat'.