Next Week!
Imbolo Mbue with Yiyun Li
Monday, March 15 at 7pm ET
TICKETS ON SALE NOW
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Monday, March 15 at 7pm ET: Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes Imbolo Mbue—author of the bestselling, PEN/Faulkner Award–winning Behold the Dreamers—for a discussion of her latest, highly anticipated novel, How Beautiful We Were. She will be joined in conversation by writer and editor Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go, Where Reasons End, and Kinder Than Solitude.
Get tickets and learn more. Book-bundled and pay-what-you-can ticket options are available.
“How Beautiful We Were goes to the heart of one of the most urgent matters of the day. The highly suspenseful story of an African village’s struggle for survival and justice in the face of ruthless American corporate greed is written with remarkable acuity and compassion. Mbue has given us a book with the richness and power of a great contemporary fable, and a heroine for our time.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend, winner of the National Book Award
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From the celebrated author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers comes a sweeping, wrenching story about the collision of a small African village and an American oil company.
We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price.
Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
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Virtual Event:
Monday, March 15
7pm ET
Join this virtual event by purchasing a ticket through Eventbrite. Each ticket includes automatic registration to the event. Book-bundled tickets also include a hardcover copy of How Beautiful We Were. Books will be shipped to ticket holders after the event. Learn more here.
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"This book is a wonder: It will make you sad, it will make you angry, it will make you want to change the world."
—Olivia M., Harvard Book Store
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"Sweeping and quietly devastating . . . a nuanced exploration of self-interest, of what it means to want in the age of capitalism and colonialism—these machines of malicious, insatiable wanting."
—The New York Times
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How Beautiful We Were will be the April selection for our Signed First Edition Club. Each month, Harvard Book Store offers Signed First Edition Club members a signed first printing of a newly published book, selected for both its literary merit and potential collectibility. Learn more here.
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