Blood on the Brain
By (Author) Esinam Bediako
Red Hen Press
Red Hen Press
2nd January 2025
United States
General
Fiction
Family life fiction
Narrative theme: Coming of age
813.6
Paperback
248
Width 139mm, Height 215mm
An impulsive, madcap, and newly concussed young woman comes of age as she navigates her Ghanaian American identity, her relationships, and the muddled landscape of history, memory, imagination, and delusion.
Twenty-four-year-old Akosua is easily knocked off her feet. When she falls and hits her head, shes too preoccupied with her latest dramas to fully absorb the shock. In the span of three months, she has broken up with her boyfriend Wisdom, discovered that her deadbeat dad has moved back to the States from Ghana, and dropped so many classes that she believes shes the only history grad student in the history of grad students to be registered for just one partial-credit class. Instead of facing her problems, Akosua seeks distraction in Daniel, a good Ghanaian man. But as her head injury worsens, she questions whether she can continue to run away from her father any more than she can keep ignoring her brain and its traumas. Vibrant, funny, and bittersweet, Blood on the Brain is a novel about the complications of family, romance, and cultureand how coming of age can feel like a blow to the head.
Esinam Bediako is a Ghanaian American writer from Detroit. She holds a BA in English from Columbia University, an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MAT in Secondary English from University of Southern California. A finalist for the Porter House Review Editors Prize, the Frontier Global Poetry Prize, and North American Reviews Terry Tempest Williams Prize, Esinam has been a high school English teacher and administrator. Her most important job is editing the masterpieces of her two young sons, who create stories, poems, and videos with enviable speed and imagination. Esinam lives in Claremont, California with her family.