Crocodile Burning

Crocodile Burning
Author: Michael Williams
Publisher: Puffin Books
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1994-08
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9780140367935

A rich novel about a young man from Soweto, whose life changes dramatically when he joins the cast of a musical that travels to Broadway.

Notes of a Crocodile

Notes of a Crocodile
Author: Qiu Miaojin
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 168137076X

WINNER OF THE 2018 LUCIEN STRYK ASIAN TRANSLATION PRIZE The English-language premiere of Qiu Miaojin's coming-of-age novel about queer teenagers in Taiwan, a cult classic in China and winner of the 1995 China Times Literature Award. An NYRB Classics Original Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure. Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend. Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.

The Crocodiles

The Crocodiles
Author: Youssef Rakha
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2014-12-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1609805720

Set in Cairo between 1997 and 2011, The Crocodiles is narrated in numbered, prose poem-like paragraphs, set against the backdrop of a burning Tahrir Square, by a man looking back on the magical and explosive period of his life when he and two friends started a secret poetry club amid a time of drugs, messy love affairs, violent sex, clumsy but determined intellectual bravado, and retranslations of the Beat poets. Youssef Rakha’s provocative, brutally intelligent novel of growth and change begins with a suicide and ends with a doomed revolution, forcefully capturing thirty years in the life of a living, breathing, daring, burning, and culturally incestuous Cairo.

Crocodile on the Sandbank

Crocodile on the Sandbank
Author: Elizabeth Peters
Publisher: C & R Crime
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 178033446X

Amelia Peabody is Elizabeth Peters' most brilliant and best-loved creation, a thoroughly Victorian feminist who takes the stuffy world of archaeology by storm with her shocking men's pants and no-nonsense attitude! In this first adventure, our headstrong heroine decides to use her substantial inheritance to see the world. On her travels, she rescues a gentlewoman in distress - Evelyn Barton-Forbes - and the two become friends. The two companions continue to Egypt where they face mysteries, mummies and the redoubtable Radcliffe Emerson, an outspoken archaeologist, who doesn't need women to help him solve mysteries -- at least that's what he thinks!

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
Author: Peter Godwin
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2008-04-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0316032093

After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downwards into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years. Then Godwin discovered a shocking family secret that helped explain their loyalty. Africa was his father's sanctuary from another identity, another world. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is a stirring memoir of the disintegration of a family set against the collapse of a country. But it is also a vivid portrait of the profound strength of the human spirit and the enduring power of love.

Butterfly Burning

Butterfly Burning
Author: Yvonne Vera
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2000-09-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466806079

Butterfly Burning brings the brilliantly poetic voice of Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera to American readers for the first time. Set in Makokoba, a black township, in the late l940s, the novel is an intensely bittersweet love story. When Fumbatha, a construction worker, meets the much younger Phephelaphi, he"wants her like the land beneath his feet from which birth had severed him." He in turn fills her "with hope larger than memory." But Phephelaphi is not satisfied with their "one-room" love alone. The qualities that drew Fumbatha to her, her sense of independence and freedom, end up separating them. And the closely woven fabric of township life, where everyone knows everyone else, has a mesh too tight and too intricate to allow her to escape her circumstances on her own. Vera exploits language to peel away the skin of public and private lives. In Butterfly Burning she captures the ebullience and the bitterness of township life, as well as the strength and courage of her unforgettable heroine.

Now Is the Time for Running

Now Is the Time for Running
Author: Michael Williams
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2011-07-05
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0316134783

When tragedy strikes, Deo's love of soccer is all he has left. Can he use that gift to find hope once more? Just down the road from their families, Deo and his friends play soccer in the dusty fields of Zimbabwe, cheered on by Deo's older brother, Innocent. It is a day like any other ..until the soldiers arrive and Deo and Innocent are forced to run for their lives, fleeing the wreckage of their village for the distant promise of safe haven. Along the way, they face the prejudice and poverty that await refugees everywhere, and must rely on the kindness of people they meet to make it through. Relevant, timely, and accessibly written, Now Is the Time For Running is a staggering story of survival that follows Deo and his mentally handicapped older brother on a transformative journey that will stick with readers long after the last page.

Diamond Boy

Diamond Boy
Author: Michael Williams
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2014-12-02
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0316320668

My father says that a journey should always change your life in some way. Well, when you have nothing, I suppose a journey promises everything. "Diamonds for everyone." That's what fifteen-year-old Patson Moyo hears when his family arrives in the Marange diamond fields. Soon Patson is working in the mines along with four friends, pooling their profits for a chance at a better life. Each of them hopes to find a girazi, a priceless stone that could change their circumstances forever. But when the government's soldiers come to Marange, Patson's world is shattered. Set against the backdrop of Zimbabwe's brutal recent history, Diamond Boy is the story of a young man who succumbs to greed but finds his way out through a transformative journey to South Africa in search of his missing sister, in search of freedom, and in search of himself. A high-stakes, harrowing adventure in the blood-diamond fields of southern Africa, from the critically acclaimed author of Now Is the Time for Running.

Now Is the Time for Running

Now Is the Time for Running
Author: Michael Williams
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-03-12
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 9780316077880

Just down the road from their families, Deo and his friends play soccer in the dusty fields of Zimbabwe, cheered on by Deo's older brother, Innocent. It is a day like any other... until the soldiers arrive and Deo and Innocent are forced to run for their lives, fleeing the wreckage of their village for the distant promise of safe haven in South Africa. Along the way, they face the prejudice and poverty that greet refugees everywhere, but eventually Deo finds hope, joining dozens of other homeless, displaced teens on the World Cup Street Soccer team--a possible ticket out of extreme hardship to a new life. Captivating and timely, Now Is the Time for Running is a staggering story of survival that follows Deo and his brother on a transformative journey that will stay with readers long after the last page.

Crocodile Tears

Crocodile Tears
Author: Anthony Horowitz
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2009
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0399250565

Alex Rider does battle with a charity broker con artist who has invested millions of dollars in a form of genetically modified corn that can release an airborne strain of virus capable of knocking out an entire country in one day.