Overview
After a year, central Africa has finally started to feel like home to Anne, a human-rights activist from California. Deeply committed to helping the strife-torn nation of Burundi during its first democratic elections, Anne has also begun an intoxicating affair with Jean-Pierre, a government official allied with the Tutsi ruling class. But when the election brings the rival Hutus to power, violence breaks out, leaving thousands of people dead, and laying bare disturbing secrets about Anne’s lover and his family. She reluctantly returns to California, only to discover troubling secrets in her own family.As she struggles with the moral implications of all she has learned, Anne must reconcile complex conflicting claims of duty and love. The True Sources of the Nile unfolds like a passionately felt love affair that initially obscures the world around it, then comes to brilliantly illuminate it.
Synopsis
“A complex novel, clarified by a confident and wonderfully readable language. It’s full of energy and place and fact, a romance, a tragedy, and a vital history lesson all in one.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list and author biography are intended to enhance your group’s discussion of The True Sources of the Nile, Sarah Stone’s powerfully romantic first novel about the conflicting claims of duty and love.
Publishers Weekly
About that title: experts disagree, citing no fewer than five possible sites. Anne, a human rights activist working in Burundi, finds the avowed source there disappointing, a slow trickle; whose version of the truth, she wonders, can be trusted? That's a vital question, because so many people in this ambitious and thoroughly absorbing first novel lie lie habitually, defensively, reflexively. Yet first novelist Stone's ability to create compelling characters is such that each time someone lies the reader is jolted. For Americans like Anne, innocence is a persistent condition. Anne believes her love for Jean-Pierre Bukimana, a member of the Burundi oligarchy, will enable the couple to transcend their cultural and racial differences; she believes no less ardently that given enough goodwill and infrastructure, peace can come to Burundi despite the epic Hutu-Tutsi conflict. As far as she is concerned, exigencies of the outside world will remain frozen indefinitely, for her family back in a Northern California apple orchard no less than for the ex-pats and Africans she works with. When she witnesses a postelection spasm of gruesome brutality, she is shaken to her core, yet she is unable to relinquish her belief, even as she joins her sisters in scoffing at their mother's need to read romance novels while enduring chemotherapy. Full of engaging parallels and paradoxes, the novel is an intricate study of family and tribal loyalty, and irrationality and its mirror image, rationalization. Agent, Candice Fuhrman. (Apr. 16) Forecast: The New York Post took notice of Stone's $100,00 advance, and encomiums that followed from the likes of Andrea Barrett, Charles Baxter and Margot Livesay suggest this novel's commercial appeal as well as its serious literary aspirations. While contemporary Burundi may not be high on every reader's interest list, the changed American consciousness after September 11 may provoke a heightened interest in war-torn regions around the world. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.