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    Radiance of Tomorrow: A Novel
    Radiance of Tomorrow: A Novel
    Radiance of Tomorrow: A Novel
    Audiobook7 hours

    Radiance of Tomorrow: A Novel

    Written by Ishmael Beah

    Narrated by Dion Graham

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateJan 7, 2014
    ISBN9781427233417
    Radiance of Tomorrow: A Novel
    Author

    Ishmael Beah

    Ishmael Beah, born in 1980 in Sierra Leone, West Africa, is the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. The book has been published in over thirty languages and was nominated for a Quill Award in 2007. Time magazine named the book as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2007, ranking it at number three. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vespertine Press, LIT, Parabola, and numerous academic journals. He is a UNICEF Ambassador and Advocate for Children Affected by War; a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Advisory Committee; an advisory board member at the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; visiting scholar at the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University; visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Genocide, Conflict Resolution, and Human Rights at Rutgers University; cofounder of the Network of Young People Affected by War (NYPAW); and president of the Ishmael Beah Foundation. He has spoken before the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and many panels on the effects of war on children. He is a graduate of Oberlin College with a B.A. in Political Science and resides in Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for Radiance of Tomorrow

    4/5

    72 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Beautifully produced an read. I really loved how authentic the African accents sounded.

      The story itself is rich and touching. I found at times that the story dragged and that the myriad of scenes and characters were a little difficult to connect to.
    • 4/5
      I read this book for my book group. What an excellent choice for an in-depth discussion. The village of Imperia has been almost leveled by the civil war in Sierra Leone. The surviving residents begin to return to rebuild and start over. The first to arrive are dismayed to find the bones of their families and friends scattered throughout the ruins. Change comes slowly but surely in the face of courage and determination. Things are beginning to look hopeful until the big mining company comes in with its ways of corruption and pollution.Beah writes soulfully in the descriptive style of his ancestors about the difficult journey to find the new normal in a world gone mad. There are so many roadblocks in their path that it is hard to imagine how their will continues. Some in our small group found the story incredibly dismal while others focused more on the indomitable spirit of the villagers. That spirit was expressed in these words by a young man who did not give up: "I learned that you are not free until you stop others from making you feel worthless. Because if you do not, you will eventually accept that you are worthless." (125)I highly recommend this book to lovers of historical fiction. It is a thoughtfully written account of the way things often work in Africa. It gave me a better understanding of the civil war in Sierra Leone in recent times and the incredible obstacles they face in rebuilding their country.
    • 5/5
      Ishmael Beah is the child soldier from Sierra Leone who wrote A Long Way Gone, a memoir of his early life. He came to the U.S. in 1997, at age 17, and graduated from Oberlin College in 2004. He is now married, lives in New York City and serves as a UNICEF Ambassador and Advocate for Children Affected by War, a member of the Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Advisory Committee, and president of his own foundation which is "dedicated to helping children and youth affected by war reintegrate into society and improve their lives. The Foundation aims at creating and financing educational and vocational opportunities for children and youth who have been affected by war, so that they can be empowered to choose a life free of conflict."Radiance of Tomorrow is Mr. Beah's first novel. It is begins in Imperi, a small village in Sierra Leone which has been destroyed by the war. All of the residents have either fled or been killed. As the book begins people start returning, first some elders then families and children who have no parents. All have lost loved ones, some have fought in the war, some have had their hands or arms cut off, one has been forced to maim others. They begin to rebuild not only the village but also their lives, sharing their meager resources and reestablishing community. But the people have changed and the world outside the village has changed. A foreign mining company moves in, causing perhaps the biggest challenge to the villagers yet.Radiance of Tomorrow is not only a compelling story, it is written in language that is often poetical. Mr. Beah chose to incorporate the cadences and figurative imagery of his native language into the book. His sun and earth are animate forces. The wind has moods. ...She sat on the ground, allowing the night's breeze to soothe her face and her pain, to dry her tears. When she was a child her grandmother told her that at the quietest hours of the night, God and gods would wave their hands through the breeze to wipe just a few things off the face of the earth so that it would be able to accommodate the following day....I learned that you are not free until you stop others from making you feel worthless Because if you do not, you will eventually accept that you are worthless. This is a beautiful, gripping book.
    • 4/5
      I heard Ishmael Beah speak when he was a student at Oberlin College several years ago. A one time child soldier from Sierra Leone, he spoke about the power of language to express the nature of a culture. In this work of fiction, Beah tells the story of people returning to their village after the ravages of war had driven them to flee. As they trickle back, the author is able to convey a deep understanding of cultural beliefs about family, about the lasting imprint of war on their psyches, about "the radiance of tomorrow" otherwise known as hope, and the deeply felt need to pass cultural tenets from generation to generation. The prose is simple, evocative, and profound. A marvelous read!
    • 3/5
      Ishmael Beah uses the fictional village of Imperi in Sierra Leone to make his political point that simple peasants can indeed recover from a devastating civil war, but corporate greed and institutional corruption are much more insidious and present significant threats to traditional culture. He creates a group of endearing villagers who struggle to regain their pre-war roots and seem to be on the verge of success when a mining company invades their village. The company and their governmental underlings are primarily interested in profit and have little regard for these people or their traditions. Along with a promise of jobs and prosperity, the mine brings pollution, death, rape and prostitution to this isolated village. Ultimately, progress comes at a high cost because corporate greed dictates that the village be flattened and its inhabitants displaced. The main characters elect to move to the capital city of Freetown, where they encounter more corruption and little of the social fabric they enjoyed in Imperi. In his short novel, Beah leaves his characters there still struggling, but one hopes that they eventually will succeed.Although uplifting and certainly enlightening, the novel lacks nuance. The villagers are universally good while the government and the mining company are bad. Beah clearly has an important point of view and his arguments seem valid, but the novel essentially is a polemic that resembles a fable with a clear moral.
    • 5/5
      Powerful book, imagery that shifts your perceptions. Although not the primary theme, this is a fine example of how our language affects our cultural perceptions and life outlook.Some elders return to their village, abandoned during the Civil War (191-2002, from news sources, not text). As more people come to make their homes, the elders welcome them and consider how to aid their healing. This is interrupted by development of a rutile mine nearby, which poisons their water, creates a hazard of roads, all by a company that values humans worth as equal to "a bag of rice" or denies any culpability. The villagers are eventually moved out of their village and the graveyard dug up. We follow one family as they attempt to start a new life elsewhere, and are left with hope for their ability to survive.It is so sad to hear about the destruction of a culture that values this world. And for a chemical that is wasted to color our toothpaste white. Boycott frivolous applications!
    • 4/5
      For the people of Sierra Leone the last few decades have been horrific, the war has demolished villages, killed many people and sent others to makeshift displacement camps. Now at last the war is over, and the people of Impari are returning to their village, to the only place they know as home. At first it is just two elders who find few houses standing and many, many dead bodies. They have no idea how many of the villagers survived, even those of their own families. More and more arrive, almost daily and they slowly start rebuilding their homes, their lives and their traditions.So this novel exemplifies the adaptability of the people, as a mine moves in and starts mining routine and while it provides jobs, it takes away more than it gives. Once again the people must adapt, until that is no longe3r possible. It is a novel of home, of reclaiming and trying to hold on to what one values. I loved these people, all of the villager, the elders, the children, the school teachers who must make an unbearable choice. My favorite though, was a young man called :"The Colonel" who is not willing to let injustices go by, but uses any means at his disposal to right a wrong.The prose is lyrical in cadence, many of the sentences have a musicality to them that is beautiful. For example, "Again," Bockarie pointed his ruler at the boy, whose voice the wind carried until the appointed time when nature began its call for the departure of that day's blues sky," There are many sentences such as this one.It shows us the importance of storytelling, which keeps the past alive, but also teaches. When the people do not survive, the story does. It showing town caught in the middle of progress, not even supported by their own government.One can look at this as a book that says progress is bad, the west is the enemy, with their quest to make money, and maybe to a point it is, but life must progress, people must adapt. This happens in many, many, places all throughout time and will continue to do so So in the final part of the book, we see will survive the changes and go on and who could not and The Colonel makes his last appearance. Ultimately one cannot always live in the same place, the same life but they can always take a part of it with themFor me, this was a very memorable read.
    • 4/5
      While some of the transitions were abrupt, especially in the beginning, this is really beautiful storytelling. The inclusion of tradition, mythology and the be lyrical traditional phrases really helped tell this story. The book didn't close with a happy ending, but it was a hopeful ending. I really loved the main family in the book, and I appreciate the telling of such an important story. A good read!
    • 4/5
      In the aftermath of the eleven year civil war in Sierra Leon that ended, at least officially, in 2002 the surviving residents of the small village of Imperi slowly make their way back home. But home is now a place of burned houses and painful memories, the elders are the first to arrive, and then the families with children born in refugee camps who have never seen Imperi before, and then the children who no longer have parents. Many of those returning are missing family members. Many are missing hands and limbs. One of them, as a child soldier had been force to cut off the hands of one of the returning families. He desperately desires to make amends to them. Can the village recover? Will they be able to regain their way of life even when a new foreign owned strip mine begins its operations nearby?Speaking before members of the American Library Association on January 25, 2014, the author, who lives in New York, describes himself as “a Sierra Leonean with American tendencies.” He noted that in the former British Colony, a precise command of the English language is considered by many Sierra Leoneans to be a competitive intellectual sport. But in his novel, he had deliberately adapted many native linguistic idioms into his English prose. He also wanted to show the generational differences that that the civil war had caused, between traditional village life and the experience of the young who had either known only the war or, if younger, knew little about it because their elders did not want to bring up painful memories. The book which is written in flawless prose, certainly achieves those goals, but the overwhelming impression I gained from the book was of its struggling inhabitants being continually knocked down by economic and political forces that were completely beyond their control and struggling valiantly against psychological defeat. Beah’s novel is much like a shorter Les Misérables, without the direct political commentary or The Grapes of Wrath.