Petina Gappah - Out of Darkness, Shining Light

Petina Gappah‘s powerful novel of exploration and adventure in nineteenth-century Africa tells the captivating story of the loyal men and women who carried explorer and missionary Dr. Livingstone’s body fifteen hundred miles across the continent of Africa, so his remains could be returned home to England and his work preserved there.

Out of Darkness, Shining Light is a story that encompasses all of the hypocrisy of slavery and colonization while celebrating resilience, loyalty, and love.

Petina Gappah is an award-winning and widely translated Zimbabwean writer. She is the author of two novels, Out of Darkness, Shining Light, The Book of Memory, and two short story collections, Rotten Row and An Elegy for Easterly. Her work has also been published in, among others, The New Yorker, Der Spiegel, The Financial Times, and the Africa Report. For many years, Petina worked as an international trade lawyer at the highest levels of diplomacy in Geneva where she advised more than seventy developing countries from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America on trade law and policy.  She currently lives in Harare.

Sarah Ladipo Manyika was raised in Nigeria and has lived in Kenya, France, and England. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and taught literature at San Francisco State University. Sarah is a Patron of the Etisalat Prize for Literature and Books Editor at ozy.com. She lives in San Francisco and currently serves on the boards of Hedgebrook and the Museum of the African Diaspora. She is the author of the forthcoming In Dependence.