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Hello to the Cannibals Book
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Amazon Review
Two women. Two centuries. One novel. It's an almost unthinkable challenge, but one that Richard Bausch (In the Night Season, Someone to Watch Over Me), commits to fully in Hello to the Cannibals. Bausch imagines a time-defying friendship emerging between Mary Kingsley, the famous Victorian explorer, and Lily Austin, a college dropout in the late 1980s who shows signs of having a promising future as a playwright. How these two women are connected, whether through stifling domestic circumstances, thwarted affections, or sheer determination, remains questionable throughout this huge novel, but it's fun to suppose, in any case. Mary, an autodidact who began a love affair with the West Coast of Africa near the end of her short life, was sentenced to a life of spinsterhood and servitude inside her own family. Lily, by contrast, is a modern woman whose hasty young marriage results in her living with her husband's estranged and whiskey-soaked family. Both heroines write their deepest fears and hopes in letter form, thus writing to and answering each other. But Bausch, in dealing with a real person's life in fictional form in contrast to an entirely fictional creation, further loads Mary Kingsley's story with a richer authenticity. Blending historical fiction and contemporary fiction would be considered an act of literary daring in lesser hands; it's a very good thing, then, that Bausch's writing is timeless, bold, and genuine throughout. --Emily Russin
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Product Description
"My heart stopped peacefully,
its beating grew slow and weak,
and then just -- stopped. I died young.
There is, really, only a little to tell."Explorer Mary Kingsley ignored the narrowly circumscribed roles and rules for a Victorian young woman. She traveled to West Africa and visited places no European had ever been. She died young, and alone.
Almost one hundred years later, a young woman named Lily Austin receives a book about explorers for her fourteenth birthday, and the only female face inside belongs to Mary Kingsley. That night, something awful and unexpected befalls Lily, setting her upon a journey of personal discovery for which Kingsley becomes a kind of spiritual companion. Lily, a young playwright, creates her own version of Mary Kingsley, using a cache of letters Kingsley wrote to an unnamed reader in the future. This is a book about the different kinds of bravery with which women, then and now, have faced the world.
- 0060930802
- 9780060930806
- Richard Bausch
- 3 June 2004
- HarperCollins
- Paperback (Book)
- 688
- Reprint
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