Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2013
368 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Eleanor Morse's rich and intimate portrait of Botswana, and of three people whose intertwined lives are at once tragic and remarkable, is an absorbing and deeply moving story.
In apartheid South Africa in 1976, medical student Isaac Muthethe is forced to flee his country after witnessing a friend murdered by white members of the South African Defense Force. He is smuggled into Botswana, where he is hired as a gardener by a young American woman, Alice Mendelssohn, who has abandoned her Ph.D. studies to follow her husband to Africa. When Isaac goes missing and Alice goes searching for him, what she finds will change her life and inextricably bind her to this sunburned, beautiful land.
Like the African terrain that Alice loves, Morse's novel is alternately austere and lush, spare and lyrical. She is a writer of great and wide-ranging gifts.
"Brutal and beautiful…Morse's unflinching portrayals of extremes of loyalty and cruelty make for an especially memorable novel." - Publishers Weekly
"Big issues of ecology, politics, borders, race relations, art, and history." - Booklist
"Morse brings the natural world of Botswana to vivid life, but her idealization of Isaac and all the black Africans as noble victims does them a disservice by making them two-dimensional in contrast to the three-dimensional whites." - Kirkus Reviews
"White Dog Fell From the Sky catches the soul of compassion. It is one of the wisest, most comprehensive, most compelling books I've ever read. ...Here's the real thing, a book of genuine intellect and inspiration, superbly written, fascinating."- Sena Jeter Naslund, New York Times bestselling author of Ahab's Wife, Abundance and Adam & Eve
"Magic, friendship, the tragedy of apartheid and the triumph of loyalty are recounted in poetic, powerful prose by this unconventional and intelligent writer. Shattering and uplifting." - Kuki Gallmann, author of I Dreamed of Africa
"White Dog Fell from the Sky is that rare thing: a convinced and convincing love story. Past that—and this novel's reach is wide—it reminds us, tellingly, how Africa is mother of us all." - Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising and The Color of Night
This information about White Dog Fell from the Sky was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Eleanor Morse is the author of An Unexpected Forest, which won the Independent Publisher's Gold Medalist Award for the Best Regional Fiction in the Northeast U.S., and was selected winner of Best Published Fiction by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance at the 2008 Maine Literary Awards. She lives on Peaks Island, Maine.
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