The Window Seat

Aminatta Forna is one of our most important literary voices, and her novels have won the Windham Campbell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book. In this elegantly rendered and wide-ranging collection of essays, Forna writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human world.

Movement is a constant here. In the title piece, “The Window Seat,” she reveals the unexpected enchantments of air travel. In “Obama and the Renaissance Generation,” she writes of the gifted young Africans who came to the United Kingdom and the United States for education and were expected to build their home countries anew after colonialism. In “The Last Vet,” time spent shadowing Dr. Jalloh, the only veterinarian in Sierra Leone, becomes a meditation on what a society’s treatment of animals tells us about its principles. In “Crossroads,” she examines race in America from an African perspective; in “Power Walking,” she describes the experience of walking in the world in a Black woman’s body; and in “The Watch,” she explores the raptures of sleep and sleeplessness the world over.

With a wry humor and cutting insight, Forna delves into the forces, natural and manmade, that have shaped our modern world, and with it, us. The Window Seat confirms that Aminatta Forna is a vital voice in international letters.