ISBN: 9789351777007    Publisher: Harper Collins India Year of publishing: 2015     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 256        Language: English

In the 1970s, Nigeria is flush with oil money, building new universities and hanging on to old colonial habits. Abeer Hoque is a Bangladeshi girl growing up in a small sunlit town, where the red clay earth, corporal punishment and running games are facts of life. At thirteen she moves with her family to suburban Pittsburgh and finds herself surrounded by clouded skies and high schoolers who speak in movie quotes and pop culture slang. Finding her place as a young woman in America proves more difficult than she can imagine. Disassociated from her parents, and laid low by academic pressure and spiralling depression, she is committed to a psychiatric ward in Philadelphia. When she moves to Bangladesh on her own, it proves to be yet another beginning for someone who is only just getting used to being an outsider - wherever she is. Arresting and beautifully written, with poems and weather conditions framing each chapter, Olive Witch is an intimate memoir about taking the long way home.
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Abeer Y. Hoque is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. She has published a book of travel photographs and poems called The Long Way Home (Ogro Dhaka 2013), and a book of linked stories, photographs and poems called The Lovers and the Leavers (Bengal Lights Books 2014, HarperCollins Publishers India 2015). She is a Fulbright Scholar and has received several other fellowships and grants. Her writing and photography have been published in Guernica, Outlook Traveller, Wasafiri, ZYZZYVA, India Today, and The Daily Star. She has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. For more information, visit olivewitch.com
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