- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; First Edition edition (5 Aug 2004)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0141015349
- ISBN-13: 978-0141015347
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.2 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 591,868 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
When Ellie's father dies she has to return to Kenya after twenty-five years to wind up his affairs. She becomes embroiled in trying to discover the secret at the heart of his life and her parents' marriage in 1960's Kenya. It was a time of keeping up appearances, stiff whiskies, English gardens amidst the African Bush, and reined in violence. Told through three voices and set against the poignant backdrop of a changing Africa, this is a wonderfully atmospheric novel about fathers, daughters and Africa.
About the Author
Melanie Finn spent the first twelve years of her life in Kenya, before moving to the USA. She has written TV scripts in Hollywood and worked as a journalist in Hong Kong, the Far East, and the UK. She divides her time between Brighton and Tanzania.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
An intake of breath, or less, the fraction of a second it took to place a paw on the road's outer edge, the flexing of tendons up the leg to the taut muscles of the shoulder. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
An intake of breath, or less, the fraction of a second it took to place a paw on the road's outer edge, the flexing of tendons up the leg to the taut muscles of the shoulder. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
As a reader you feel very comfortable when you read about places and events you were at some time familiar with. Away from You does that if you were connected in any way with colonial and post colonial Africa. In this case the context is East Africa. Melanie Finn seems to have a very understanding about the politics, economics and racial contexts and interactions, which were and are very complex.
The book is clearly written and the descriptions are detailed and enable the reader to visualise each event very clearly.
There are two major issues for me. The first one is what is now quite a common technique; this is when the author goes from the present to the past and then back to the present. In this book it does not work. Events from the past do not necessarily relate to current developments.
Secondly, I found the story not very convincing. There appears to be a strong element of reprisals, but why should someone want so desperately to prove that their deceased father was a murderer? At the end of the book you are not sure how the return trip to East Africa has helped Ellie with understanding her past, or shape her future life.
The book is clearly written and the descriptions are detailed and enable the reader to visualise each event very clearly.
There are two major issues for me. The first one is what is now quite a common technique; this is when the author goes from the present to the past and then back to the present. In this book it does not work. Events from the past do not necessarily relate to current developments.
Secondly, I found the story not very convincing. There appears to be a strong element of reprisals, but why should someone want so desperately to prove that their deceased father was a murderer? At the end of the book you are not sure how the return trip to East Africa has helped Ellie with understanding her past, or shape her future life.
Format:Paperback
This novel of the experiences of two generations of colonial life in Africa is sometimes visceral and discomforting reading, but it is also lyrical and beautiful in its depiction of the fatal hold Africa can take on the minds and hearts of those who struggle to live there. After a failed love affair in England, Helen is sent to live with her Aunt B and Uncle Stanley, who run a farm in Uganda. She arrives as a young woman and stays as a wife with the dashing John Cameron who saves her when their car is attacked on the eve of Independence.
The different time-lines are told from the point of view of Helen, and many years later her daughter Ellie, as Ellie tries to discover the truth about her father - a drinker and adulterer, is he also a murderer? As always with two time-lines, if the stories are at all compelling, one feels the pull of one against the other, and I wondered while reading what is wrong with just telling a story in its chronological order? Perhaps, sometimes, the double-time structure is necessary, but surely not always!
Having got that moan off my chest, I have to say that this book is a wonderful read. The characters are brilliantly realised and the story is truly evocative and enthralling. It is one of the best, most effective depictions of the colonial experience I have ever read. This book was shortlisted for the Orange Prize a few years ago, and although it didn't win, it must have been among the best reads of the year.
The different time-lines are told from the point of view of Helen, and many years later her daughter Ellie, as Ellie tries to discover the truth about her father - a drinker and adulterer, is he also a murderer? As always with two time-lines, if the stories are at all compelling, one feels the pull of one against the other, and I wondered while reading what is wrong with just telling a story in its chronological order? Perhaps, sometimes, the double-time structure is necessary, but surely not always!
Having got that moan off my chest, I have to say that this book is a wonderful read. The characters are brilliantly realised and the story is truly evocative and enthralling. It is one of the best, most effective depictions of the colonial experience I have ever read. This book was shortlisted for the Orange Prize a few years ago, and although it didn't win, it must have been among the best reads of the year.
Format:Paperback
Well I really enjoyed this book, a lovely quick read, but a poignant and evocative story of Africa. Melanie Finn tells the truth about Africa - she shows us what, white Africans were like at this time - but also what they felt about their land, and their homes. However she acknowledges the awful racism, that some of them practised, the way they talked about and to the black house hold staff. This is at heart a novel about a woman, damaged by her past, and her search for the truth about her father, a man she only remembers dimly, as a drinking bully. In returning to Africa Ellie leaves Peter behind, a man who barely figures at all in the narrative, but who we feel through Ellie's melencholy - in fact we are told in one moving passage how Ellie believes she will continue looking for Peter on every street.
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