Our Sister Killjoy (Faber Editions)

Join a young Ghanaian woman on her journey into Europe's heart of whiteness to meet the natives in this iconoclastic modern classic.

'A wondrous discovery.' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
'A treasure: one of the works that inspired my own literary journey.' Tsitsi Dangarembga
'Aidoo has reaffirmed my faith in the power of the written word.' Alice Walker
'Modest, lyrical, reflective and intelligent .. Deserves as wide an audience as it can get.' Angela Carter

'Ver do you come from?' she asked Sissie. 'Ghana.' 'Is that near Canada?'

Sissie is leaving Ghana for the first time. Arriving in Europe on a scholarship to experience the glories of a Western education, she plunges into this new continent's heart of whiteness, observing the strange customs of the natives.

Drinking cocktails at the German Embassy, she cringes at her countrymen.
In a Bavarian castle, she is seduced by the lonely mother of Little Adolf.
In freezing London, she witnesses 'been-tos' sharing myths of an overseas idyll.
In between continents, she writes a letter on the plane to her exiled former lover.
But it is not sent. She will tell these tales back at home.

Ama Ata Aidoo's landmark debut Our Sister Killjoy exploded into the world in 1977. With its blistering feminist satire of the West African diaspora, colonial legacies and toxic racism, expressed in a radical literary form - prose poetry, letter, manifesto - its provocative impact remains unmatched half a century on.

Introduced by Ayesha Harruna Attah

Ama Ata Aidoo (1942- 2023) was a Ghanaian writer, politician, academic and activist. Born in a Fante royal household, her grandfather was murdered by British neocolonialists and her father was a chief who built their village's first school. Aidoo obtained a degree in English from the University of Ghana and won her first story contest aged 19. She became the first published female African dramatist in 1965; her novel Changes: A Love Story won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992. She taught at the University of Ghana and University of Cape Coast, then abroad as a Fulbright scholar and writer in residence. She served as Minister of Education in Ghana in the 1980s but resigned when she could not make education free for all. After moving to Zimbabwe in 1983, she developed government curriculums, and in 2002, founded the Mbaasem Foundation for African women writers.

Ayesha Harruna Attah is a Ghanaian-born writer living in Senegal. She was educated at Mount Holyoke College, Columbia University, and New York University. She is the author of the Commonwealth Writers Prize-nominated Harmattan Rain, Saturdays Shadows, The Hundred Wells of Salaga, currently translated into four languages, Zainab Takes New York and The Deep Blue Between, a book for young adults. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Elle Italia, Asymptote and the 2010 Caine Prize Writers' Anthology.