overran their homeland, sothe young men began enlisting in
droves. Among them was Color Sergeant Bombay. He would
quickly find out that someone must have confused his nation’s
domestic frontiers with a place half the world away. The only
terrain on which he would war was forty-four days and several
bouts of seasickness from his homeland by ship, in an alien
jungle where after two years of nightmarish combat as part of
the Forgotten Army he would be stunned by the realization that
everything he thought fantastic was indeed credible. *When the
bugle sounded and Bombay woke with a jerk in the darkness,
he didn’t know where he was or what on earth he was doing
there. The space in which he found himself was too large to be
his bedroom. Its array of double bunks stretching away into the
dimness was spooky in the waning moonlight and the shrouded
Aminatta Forna (born 1964) is a Scottish-born British writer. She is
the author of a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, and
three novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010)
and The Hired Man (2013). Her novel The Memory of Love was
awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011,
and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is
Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until
recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams
College in Massachusetts. On 7 March 2014, Aminatta Forna was
announced as the recipient of the 2014 Windham–Campbell
Literature Prize (Fiction)
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Le portrait magazine