And Home Was Kariakoo ─ A Memoir of East Africa

From M.G. Vassanji, two-time Giller Prize winner and a GG winner for Non-fiction, comes a poignant love letter to his birthplace and homeland, East Africa--a powerful and surprising portrait that only an insider could write.

Part travelogue, part memoir, and part history-rarely-told, here is a powerful and timely portrait of a constantly evolving land. From a description of Zanzibar and its evolution to a visit to a slave-market town at Lake Tanganyika; from an encounter with a witchdoctor in an old coastal village to memories of his own childhood in the streets of Dar es Salaam and the suburbs of Nairobi, Vassanji combines brilliant prose, thoughtful and candid observation, and a lifetime of revisiting and reassessing the continent that molded him--and, as we discover when we follow the journeys that became this book, shapes him still.

M.G. VASSANJI is the author of six novels, two collections of short stories, and two works of nonfiction. His first novel,The Gunny Sack, was winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Canada and the Caribbean. He has won the Giller Prize for bothThe Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, and the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction forA Place Within: Rediscovering India. His novel The Assassin's Song was shortlisted for both the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. He was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania, and attended university in the United States. He lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife and two sons.