The Jive Talker: Or, How to Get a British Passport (Hardcover)

`many amusing moments in this memoir'

`a beguiling journey under the warm, sad, funny, chaotic, wacky, wise skin of one of the poorest countries in Africa'
--Sunday Telegraph

`I loved this brilliant Malawian coming of age novel. It's funny, sad, shocking, pacey, bursting with energy and talent.'

`This Malawian-born, award-winning conceptual artist uses his background to and brilliant mind to craft a truly original book'

`humorously recounted but poverty and sickness, and above all Aids, add dark textures to Kambalu's philosophy'

`This Malawian-born, award-winning conceptual artist uses his background and brilliant mind to craft a truly original book'

`humorously recounted but poverty and sickness, and above all Aids add dark textures to Kambalu's philosophy'

`a book filled with wonder, humour and hope. It is a magnificent achievement.'

Kambalu's nuanced characters bring Malawi to life... For, as he shows in this riveting, brilliant book, there is always more than one way of understanding the world

an African memoir unlike any other I have read and the reason is this - it is absolutely hilarious and I was crying with laughter... this is a book filled with wonder, humour and hope. It is a magnificent achievement

Read Kambalu, cry, clap your hands

Samson Kambalu's father wore three-piece, London-made suits from the Sixties. He'd planned to be a doctor but settled for hospital administration and a peripatetic lifestyle with his ever expanding family in tow. He is 'the Jive Talker' of this extraordinary memoir - a man of thwarted ambition, boundless optimism and manic philosophising, he died of AIDS in 1995, bequeathing his son 'the Diptych' - an eclectic library of science, philosophy and English language classics & shy; a passion for words and a boundless imagination. In this completely original, often subversive, book, Samson Kambalu writes of his childhood in Malawi, a country few are able to pinpoint on a map. As the family moves from feast to real poverty and deprivation, and back to plenty again, depending on their father's professional fortunes, we are introduced to life in a country in which no dissent is tolerated, where political opponents are 'disappeared' and a portrait of Life President Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda is always guaranteed to be watching. But this is also a country in which a little boy obsessed with books, girls, Nietzsche, fashion, football and Michael Jackson wins a free education at the Kamuzu Academy ('The Eton of Africa') and grows up to be one of England's most promising young conceptual artists. With dazzling prose, wicked humour and not a little bit of artistic licence, The Jive Talker opens the door to an Africa that is rarely written about.

Samson Kambalu was born in Malawi in 1975. He holds degrees in Fine Art and Ethnomusicology and is the recipient of several awards for his work "Holy Ball Exercises and Exorcisms". He lives in London.