Africa Junction

Product Description

Adele is in a mess. On her own with her young son, struggling to cope with her job as a teacher, & stuck in a disastrous
- & dangerous
- affair, her life is unravelling. The sharp contrasts & certainties she experienced during the years she spent as a child in far-off Senegal have faded to a distant blur. Then, one night, when she looks in the bathroom mirror, she sees the face of Ellena, a girl she knew in those carefree days, staring back at her from the glass. As the daughter of a nightwatchman in exile from the brutal conflict in Liberia, Ellena's childhood was far from the idyll of Adele's memories. Her mysterious appearance sets in motion a chain of events that takes Adele back to Africa, in the hope that she can make amends for a heartless act that broke the girls' friendship & damaged Ellena's family irrevocably. Africa Junction artfully interweaves the stories of dramatically different lives & experiences
- a Senegalese boy setting sail for Europe, a Welsh teenager running from Timbuktu, a young girl escaping from a life of slave-labour in Mali
- but at its heart is Adele & her quest. From the rain-drenched streets of Britain to the sun-baked reds & yellows of Senegal & the violence of Liberia's civil war, Africa Junction follows one woman's attempt to draw the threads of her life together. Out of the quagmire of violence & hardship there emerges a tentative vision of common humanity &, ultimately, the possibility both of redemption & of love.