Our Beautiful Darkness: A Graphic Novel

(Hardback)

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Description

A blackout leads two teens to discover the intimacy and vulnerability that can only be shared in darkness in Our Beautiful Darkness, a fully illustrated YA novella from celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki and illustrator Antnio Jorge Gonalves.

Translated from Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann

The light goes out suddenly. And in this absence of light, a pair of teenagers bare their souls. Into the warm silence of the night, they share a conversation filled with their stories and dreams... and maybe even a first kiss.

Set against the backdrop of the civil war that ravaged Angola in the 1990s, this book weaves the country's history with a teenage boy's family stories. But when a power outage shrouds the neighborhood in darkness, everyday realities fade away... As the boy and a girl sit talking in the backyard, memory gives way to imagination and vulnerability, and the space between them becomes charged with emotional electricity.

Their resulting conversation is both a meditation on the storytelling impulse and a gripping narrative of first love that, through its particulars, ascends to the universal.

Reviews

STARRED REVIEW! Miller-Lachmann does a remarkable job of making this rich piece accessible to an English-language readership. Ondjakis poetic prose draws an achingly potent picture of two young people reaching for each other during a sudden moment of possibility, while the white text on the black pages and Gonalves rough, white-on-black illustrations help create an immersive experience. As the best art does, this collaboration makes a very specific storytwo young people, one nightfeel universal. A brilliantly elemental exploration of the light that darkness can bring. * Kirkus Reviews *

Author Bio

Ondjaki was born in Luanda, Angola in 1977. His novels, short stories, poetry, and childrens books have received numerous prizes. He received the Jos Saramago Prize and Littrature-Monde Prize for his novel Transparent City, which was translated into seven languages and included in best-book roundups by Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lit Hub, Globe and Mail, World Literature Today, and more.
Antnio Jorge Gonalves is a Portuguese creator of graphic novels and picture books. A long-time political cartoonist for the Portuguese newspaper Pblico, he has also published in Courrier International and Le Monde. He created a live digital drawing technique with which he has performed onstage with musicians, actors, and dancers worldwide. He received Portugals National Illustration Prize for Our Beautiful Darkness.
Lyn Miller-Lachmann translates childrens books from Portuguese to English, including award-winning picture book The World in a Second and YA graphic novel Pardalita. She is the author of Torch, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for YA Literature, and co-author (with Zetta Elliott) of the middle grade verse novel Moonwalking.