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Published Mar 2011
256 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
When Adjoa leaves Ghana to find work in the Ivory Coast, she hopes that one day she'll return home to open a beauty parlor. Her dream comes true, though not before she suffers a devastating loss - one that will haunt her for years, and one that also deeply affects Janice, an American aid worker who no longer feels she has a place to call home. But the bustling Precious Brother Salon is not just the "cleanest, friendliest, and most welcoming in the city." It's also where locals catch up on their gossip; where Comfort, an imperious busybody, can complain about her American daughter-in-law, Linda; and where Adjoa can get a fresh start on life - or so she thinks, until Janice moves to Ghana and unexpectedly stumbles upon the salon.
At once deeply moving and utterly charming, The Civilized World follows five women as they face meddling mothers-in-law, unfaithful partners, and the lingering aftereffects of racism, only to learn that their cultural differences are outweighed by their common bond as women. With vibrant prose, Susi Wyss explores what it means to need forgiveness - and what it means to forgive.
"In this smart, urbane debut... Wyss offers nuanced takes on vastly different corners of Africa, transcending travelogue to achieve resonant narratives - sometimes funny, sometimes stark - with both grit and heart." - Publishers Weekly
"[Wyss] beautifully and effortlessly captures the essence of human connection, demonstrating that despite the cultural and personal differences that separate individuals, we are often related by common threads." - Library Journal
"A sober debut which scrutinizes family and relationship bonds with empathy but not much imaginative zest." - Kirkus Reviews
"Without meaning to perhaps, Wyss has perpetrated a stereotype... Blacks are vibrant, complex and full of life; whites are pale, lifeless and dull as planks. That can’t really be true, but that's what it looks like here." - The Washington Post
"Wyss grants her appealing characters a mesmerizing mixture of fresh starts, second chances, forgiveness, and redemption." - Booklist
"Wyss dispels the vague Western concept of Africa as a monolith, a continent teeming with poverty, disease, and relentless civil unrest; instead, she depicts its quotidian ebb and flow… [and] successfully transmutes personal experience into affecting fiction." - Urbanite
"In The Civilized World, almost all the characters live, whether from choice or necessity, between countries and cultures. I am full of admiration for how vividly Susi Wyss brings Africa to life and for the empathy with which she explores the longings of her characters, African and American, for children, home, money, work and family. A beautiful and timely book." - Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street
This information about The Civilized World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Susi Wyss's fiction is influenced by her twenty-year career managing women's health programs in Africa, where she lived for more than eight years. She holds a B.A. from Vassar, an M.P.H. from Boston University, and an M.A. in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. The Civilized World is her first book. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.
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