Dark Tower boxed setHmmm...looks like it might be right up my older son's alley. He's read some Stephen King, and loves fantasy stuff.
Not my cup of tea, I must admit.
I just started Lawrence Hill's "The Book of Negroes" (
Someone Knows My Name in the US) - a wonderful book by a Canadian writer. (brother of musician Dan Hill, who I met many moons ago when he came up to our camp to visit; interesting guy, though I was never a fan of his music!)
It won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for 2008 and the Writer's Trust of Canada prize for 2007. The US publisher
changed the name of the book to "Someone Knows My Name" - as Lawrence Hill explains in the Guardian.
From Amazon.ca:
QUOTE
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Stunning, wrenching and inspiring, the fourth novel by Canadian novelist Hill (Any Known Blood) spans the life of Aminata Diallo, born in Bayo, West Africa, in 1745. The novel opens in 1802, as Aminata is wooed in London to the cause of British abolitionists, and begins reflecting on her life. Kidnapped at the age of 11 by British slavers, Aminata survives the Middle Passage and is reunited in South Carolina with Chekura, a boy from a village near hers. Her story gets entwined with his, and with those of her owners: nasty indigo producer Robinson Appleby and, later, Jewish duty inspector Solomon Lindo. During her long life of struggle, she does what she can to free herself and others from slavery, including learning to read and teaching others to, and befriending anyone who can help her, black or white. Hill handles the pacing and tension masterfully, particularly during the beginnings of the American revolution, when the British promise to free Blacks who fight for the British: Aminata's related, eventful travels to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone follow. In depicting a woman who survives history's most trying conditions through force of intelligence and personality, Hill's book is a harrowing, breathtaking tour de force.
