The Devil That Danced on the Water

One of our favorite novels to recommend in recent years has been Happiness, Forna's story of two people meeting in London: Jean, an American woman in her 40s, and Attila, a wonderfully appealing Ghanaian man in his 60s. After reading this memoir, I couldn't help imagining that Attila is an idealized portrait of the man Forna's father might have lived to become. The Devil That Danced on the Water recounts Forna's earliest years, as she is shuttled between Sierra Leone and Scotland, the homelands of her father and mother, while her idealistic physician father rises in the government of his newly independent nation and is then destroyed as it falls into dictatorship. It's a tender, fascinating, and brilliantly observed story that seamlessly weaves together her child's perspective with the often terrible knowledge of later experience.