Our Beautiful Darkness: A Graphic Novel

A blackout leads two teens to discover intimacy and vulnerability in Our Beautiful Darkness, a YA novella translated from Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann. Set against the backdrop of Angola's civil war in the 1990s, the book weaves the country's history with a teenage boy's family stories. When a power outage shrouds the neighborhood in darkness, everyday realities fade away, and the space between them becomes charged with emotional electricity.

Format: Hardback
Length: 126 pages
Publication date: 10 October 2024
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books

A blackout leads two teens to discover the intimacy and vulnerability that can only be shared in darkness in "Our Beautiful Darkness," a fully illustrated YA novella from celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki and illustrator António Jorge Gonçalves. Translated from Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann, "Our Beautiful Darkness" is a Kirkus Best YA Book of 2024 and a Five Books Best New Book for Teens of 2024. Set against the backdrop of the civil war that ravaged Angola in the 1990s, this book weaves the country's history with a teenage boy's family stories. But when a power outage shrouds the neighborhood in darkness, everyday realities fade away. As the boy and a girl sit talking in the backyard, memory gives way to imagination and vulnerability, and the space between them becomes charged with emotional electricity. Their resulting conversation is both a meditation on the storytelling impulse and a gripping narrative of first love that, through its particulars, ascends to the universal.

Dimension: 216 x 135 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781592704101