Our Beautiful Darkness - Hardcover
Pay over time for orders over $35.00 with
Offers & Perks
Earn 12 points with this purchase
Added to your rewards balance after checkout.
100 points welcome bonus
Create an account and start with extra points.
A blackout leads two teens to discover the intimacy and vulnerability that can only be shared in darkness in Our Beautiful Darkness, a fully illustrated YA novella from celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki and illustrator Ant?nio Jorge Gon?alves.
Translated from Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
A Kirkus Best YA Book of 2024A Five Books Best New Book for Teens of 2024
The light goes out suddenly. And in this absence of light, a pair of teenagers bare their souls. Into the warm silence of the night, they share a conversation filled with their stories and dreams... and maybe even a first kiss.
Set against the backdrop of the civil war that ravaged Angola in the 1990s, this book weaves the country's history with a teenage boy's family stories. But when a power outage shrouds the neighborhood in darkness, everyday realities fade away... As the boy and a girl sit talking in the backyard, memory gives way to imagination and vulnerability, and the space between them becomes charged with emotional electricity.
Their resulting conversation is both a meditation on the storytelling impulse and a gripping narrative of first love that, through its particulars, ascends to the universal.
Ondjaki was born in Luanda, Angola in 1977. His novels, short stories, poetry, and children's books have received numerous prizes. He received the Jos? Saramago Prize and Litt?rature-Monde Prize for his novel Transparent City, which was translated into seven languages and included in best-book roundups by Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lit Hub, Globe and Mail, World Literature Today, and more.
Ant?nio Jorge Gon?alves is a Portuguese creator of graphic novels and picture books. A long-time political cartoonist for the Portuguese newspaper P?blico, he has also published in Courrier International and Le Monde. He created a live digital drawing technique with which he has performed onstage with musicians, actors, and dancers worldwide. He received Portugal's National Illustration Prize for Our Beautiful Darkness.
Lyn Miller-Lachmann translates children's books from Portuguese to English, including award-winning picture book The World in a Second and YA graphic novel Pardalita. She is the author of Torch, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for YA Literature, and co-author (with Zetta Elliott) of the middle grade verse novel Moonwalking.
Contributor(s)
Author
Free shipping on orders over $75. Standard shipping takes 3-7 business days. Returns accepted within 30 days of purchase.