I don't want to give too much away -- the book's back cover explicitly warns against it -- but the book is told from the perspective of two women, one of whom is a refugee living in London. So I'm admittedly biased, since I'm soaking up anything London-related these days, but what really struck me were the passages on displacement told from the asylum seeker's perspective, since they struck home.
"I was thinking, That sunshine, that color yellow, maybe I will not see very much of these now. Maybe the new color of my life was gray. Two years in the gray detention center, and now I was an illegal immigrant. That means, you are free until they catch you. That means, you live in a gray area. I thought about the years, living as quiet as could be. Hiding my colors and living in the twilight and the shadows."
"I am only alive at all because I learned the Queen's English. Maybe you are thinking, that isn't so hard. After all, English is the official language of my country, Nigeria. Yes, but the trouble is that back home we speak it so much better than you. To talk the Queen's English, I had to forget all the best tricks of my mother tongue. For example, the Queen could never say, There was plenty of wahala, that girl done use her bottom part to engage my number one son and anyone could see she would end in the bad bush. Instead the Queen must say, My late daughter-in-law used her feminine charms to become engaged to my heir, and one might have foreseen that it wouldn't end well. It is all a little sad, don't you think? Learning the Queen's English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toenails, the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had."
* Note: Fail, Newark Airport, fail! According to their website, there's a Borders in Terminal A. Not true! (Also fail: no bagels at LAX's Terminal 4!)
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