The Strangler Vine was long listed for the 2014 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and the description — historical fiction set in early 19th-century India featuring a green soldier, a wizened political operative and Thuggees — made it sound too good to pass up. Images of Indiana Jones came to mind, but Carter offers her readers so much more than that pulpy comic-booky fare. Trained as a journalist, she delivers a meticulously researched political novel that reminded me of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and […]
A dark tale of colonialism and liberation in Africa
This is a remarkable book about religion, racism, sexism, feminism, colonialism, capitalism, socialism … and about an amazing family that came to Africa as missionaries and learned truths that had nothing to do with God and everything to do with humanity. The Price family arrives in the then-Belgian Congo of 1959, headed by Southern Baptist Reverend Nathan Price, a wife-abusing, child-abusing, fanatical tyrant and bitter disappointment of a man. He and his captive wife Orleana and his four daughters arrive unwanted in an impoverished Congolese village […]
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