The reincarnation of a legendary nineteenth-century Caribbean emperor as a contemporary African leader is at the heart of this novel.Sacred Riverdeals with the extraordinary lives, hopes, powerful myths, stories, and tragedies of the people of a modern West African nation. It is also the compelling love story of an idealistic philosophy professor and an ex-courtesan of incomparable beauty. Two hundred years after his death, the great Haitian emperor Henri Christophe miraculously appears in a dream to Tankor Satani, president of the fictional West African country of Kissi, with instructions for Tankor to continue Henri Christophe’s rule, which had been interrupted by “that damned Napoleon.”
Ambitious in scope,Sacred Riveris a diaspora-inspired novel, in which Cheney-Coker has tackled the major themes of politics, social strife, crime and punishment, and human frailty and redemption in Malagueta, the fictional, magical town and its surroundings first created by the author inThe Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, for which he was awarded the coveted Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.Sacred Riveris equally about love and politics, and marks the return to fiction of one of Africa’s major writers.
The reincarnation of a legendary nineteenth-century Caribbean emperor as a contemporary African leader is at the heart of this novel.Sacred Riverdeals with the extraordinary lives, hopes, powerful myths, stories, and tragedies of the people of a modern West African nation.
“Sacred Riveris a novel of epic proportions powered by a microscopic gaze and magisterial sweep. Told with pain and passion, withering wit and satiric humor, this is a tale of these and other times: thronged, sensuous, cerebral, and visionary in the most unpredictable ways. There is magic in the telling, a magic wrought from the myths and legends of the African world, and facts which belie the stranglƒ–
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