Publications

Nile Baby
By Elleke Boehmer

Product details

Price: £8.99 Place an order for this book! ISBN: 978-0-9555079-3-9 Extent: 272 pages Publication Date: July 2008 Rights: World

Synopsis

Nile Baby is an imaginatively daring story with a universal appeal, about two young friends - Alice Brass Khan and Arnie Binns, both twelve, both pre-teen misfits who discover a ninety-year-old foetus specimen in the laboratory storeroom of their school and set out on two very different journeys to return it to its rightful home. Their paths lead them to discover not only their absent fathers but other buried and surprising roots. Close to the River Thames and not far from Heathrow Airport, the two friends reunite to find at the end of their adventure that their foetus-creature will finally insist on its own manner of leaving them.

Key Selling Points

• Elleke Boehmer’s vivid and compelling story explores the African presence buried deep in the heart of England and will appeal to all readers interested in representations of Africa both at home and abroad.
• Nile Baby is an imaginative and daring novel of Diasporic Africa that tests the boundaries between the living and the dead and between the ‘other’ and ourselves.
• With its resonances of Conrad and Achebe, the narrative confronts the restless ghosts of the past that reside in the most familiar and unexpected places of our psyche.
• This intriguing page-turning novel will appeal to those familiar with African fiction as well as newcomers to the genre.

About the Author

Elleke Boehmer was born of Dutch parents in Durban, South Africa where she was educated and later at Oxford University. She has three published novels - Screens Against the Sky (1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines (2000) and is working on Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (to be published by Oxford

University Press on 18 July to coincide with Nelson Mandela’s 90th Birthday). She is currently Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, UK.