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    Aftershocks
    Aftershocks
    Aftershocks
    Audiobook8 hours

    Aftershocks

    Written by Nadia Owusu

    Narrated by Nadia Owusu

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In the tradition of The Glass Castle, this “gorgeous” (The New York Times, Editors’ Choice) and deeply felt memoir from Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu tells the “incredible story” (Malala Yousafzai) about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through.

    “In Aftershocks, Nadia Owusu tells the incredible story of her young life. How does a girl—abandoned by her mother at age two and orphaned at thirteen when her beloved father dies—find her place in the world? This memoir is the story of Nadia creating her own solid ground across countries and continents. I know the struggle of rebuilding your life in an unfamiliar place. While some of you might be familiar with that and some might not, I hope you’ll take as much inspiration and hope from her story as I did.” —MALALA YOUSAFZAI

    ​ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 SELECTED BY VULTURE, TIME, ESQUIRE, NPR, AND VOGUE!

    Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo.

    With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together.

    “A magnificent, complex assessment of selfhood and why it matters” (Elle), Aftershocks depicts the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand.

    “Full of narrative risk and untrammeled lyricism” (The Washington Post), Aftershocks joins the likes of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and William Styron’s Darkness Visible, and does for race identity what Maggie Nelson does for gender identity in The Argonauts.

    Editor's Note

    Deeply compelling…

    As the daughter of a United Nations official, Nadia Owusu’s childhood was nomadic, never allowing her family to put down roots. An absent mother, the death of her father as an adolescent, and a series of family secrets and lies left her unmoored; depression threatened to drag her down further. Her move to New York and subsequent rewriting of her own identity result in a deeply compelling tale of self-fulfillment in a sea of turmoil.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJan 12, 2021
    ISBN9781797108698
    Aftershocks
    Author

    Nadia Owusu

    Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urban planner. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her lyric essay So Devilish a Fire won the Atlas Review chapbook contest. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Granta, The Guardian, Bon Appétit, Electric Literature, The Paris Review Daily, and Catapult. Aftershocks is her first book.

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    Reviews for Aftershocks

    4.5/5

    74 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Great memoir narrated by the author herself. It’s a fascinating kaleidoscope life in various places she has lived as well as a very personal recollections of her life, her hurts and sorrows, her griefs and experiences dealing with the hostile world.
    • 5/5
      The writing connects you to the author's lived experience in unqiue and beautiful ways. The non linear timeline is especially impactful as she is weaving together the elements of belonging to places, spaces, people.
    • 4/5
      I particularly loved the audiobook version narrated by the author herself, as it adds an extra personal note to the memoir. Probably Aftershocks is one of my favorite memoirs I´ve read in the last months, especially for the particular introspective touch and the search for understanding rather than (mis)judging facts and people. Strongly recommended as a memoir writing material as well.
    • 5/5
      A thoughtful read by the author memoir that explores place, self, family and the ridiculousness of boundaries in geography and identity.