Petals of Blood

“The definitive African book of the twentieth century” (Moses Isegawa, from the Introduction) by the Nobel Prize–nominated Kenyan writer

The puzzling murder of three African directors of a foreign-owned brewery sets the scene for this fervent, hard-hitting novel about disillusionment in independent Kenya. A deceptively simple tale, Petals of Blood is on the surface a suspenseful investigation of a spectacular triple murder in upcountry Kenya. Yet as the intertwined stories of the four suspects unfold, a devastating picture emerges of a modern third-world nation whose frustrated people feel their leaders have failed them time after time.

First published in 1977, this novel was so explosive that its author was imprisoned without charges by the Kenyan government. His incarceration was so shocking that newspapers around the world called attention to the case, and protests were raised by human-rights groups, scholars, and writers, including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Harold Pinter, and Margaret Drabble.

• A Grain of Wheat (Penguin African Writers Series)
• Devil on the Cross (Penguin African Writers Series)
• Weep Not, Child (Penguin African Writers Series)
• A Small Place
• Wizard of the Crow
• The River Between (Penguin African Writers Series)
• Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
• Nervous Conditions [Import]
• A Tempest: Based on Shakespeare's 'The Tempest;' Adaptation for a Black Theatre
• Island Beneath the Sea: A Novel (P.S.)