A Storm Blew in from Paradise

"Hypnotic...a sophisticated meditation on politics, race and ethnicity. (...) Anyuru's prose is incandescent." --Peter Kimani, The New York Times Book Review "An extraordinary life in exile inspires a multilayered novel. (...) A deeply moving meditation on identity and history, the personal and the political, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction." --Kirkus Review P's greatest dream is to fly. He sets out to become a Ugandan fighter pilot, training in an academy in Greece. When the 1971 Idi Amin coup in his homeland disrupts his plans, he defects and becomes a man on the run. In this extraordinary novel based on his own father's fate, Anyuru evokes P's struggles in gorgeous, vivid prose. As a refugee, military-camp prisoner, and exile, P never gives up hope and continues to dream of life as a pilot. In a story told across two generations, P searches for identity and purpose in a world in which nowhere is home.

About the Author :
Johannes Anyuru (Sweden, 1979), the son of a Ugandan father and a Swedish mother, is a novelist and poet. A Storm Blew in from Paradise enjoyed immense success in Sweden and was awarded two major Swedish literature prizes: the Svenska Dagbladet Literature Prize and the Aftonbladet Literature Prize.

Review :
"[A Storm Blew in from Paradise] is a tour de force of significant talent and deceptively understated craft in every paragraph and on every page. Written in easy, quiet diction and register, with painstaking attentiveness to the beauty and richness of literary language, it is an unblinking exploration of suffering, isolation, and physical and mental pain...Johannes Anyuru's novel takes pains to gesture at the crisis of the survival of not just refugees and postcolonial migrants, but for the Anthropocene." --Nandini Bhattacharya, The Literary Review "In January 1971, Uganda's president, Milton Obote, was deposed by his army commander, Idi Amin, (...) followed by a reign of terror. (...) In his hypnotic semiautobiographical novel, Johannes Anyuru, born in Sweden in 1979 to a Ugandan father and a Swedish mother, peels back these layers of turmoil, revealing how Amin's rise to power altered his father's life and provided a prologue for his own. (...)Anyuru's prose is incandescent, effortlessly navigating the turbulence in his hero's life. The story frame is tight, focusing on a few months of P's incarceration and his subsequent exile, but it opens out into a sophisticated meditation on politics, race and ethnicity." --Peter Kimani, The New York Times Book Review "A deeply moving meditation on identity and history, the personal and the political, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction." --Kirkus Reviews "While a resilient human can be broken, resilience itself can't....a lesson that comes across clearly in Anyuru's effective debut novel." --Rain Taxi "Johannes Anyuru tenderly and poetically paints a masterful portrait of his father, of a voyage, of a quest, and of a life trapped by history. A sometimes terrible and unforgettable destiny which resounds like a cry of hope in the greatest hopelessness. A dangerous but life-saving voyage--be it simply to serve as reminder never again to be forgotten to lift our eyes to the heavens." --Actes Sud "A strikingly beautiful text pierced with today's doubts and theories about what creates true meaning in the life story of a single human being, as well as in history. This is a personal and universal novel about fatherlessness and identity, about the power of violence and about how we are all prisoners of time." --Aftonbladet "Johannes Anyuru's language hurls itself, like the main character of this book, straight into the sun, burning and scorching." --Helsingborgs Dagblad "You feel the breeze from the storm out of paradise, you feel the large movements, you feel the hypnotic effect of a prose that can make you visualize the Angel of History zooming in on a building in Växjö. It is fantastic." --Expressen "Anyuru's searingly poetic style rescues his writing from bleakness and sentimentality alike as he confronts the lies we live by." --The Independent "A tense, sparse re-telling of a life. This novel is a shining example of literature's ability to give its readers a new perspective on the world, and an excellent way to learn about the emotional consequences of war and exile. I can honestly say that A Storm Blew in from Paradise is the best Swedish novel I have read in a long time. I would advise anyone interested in the writing process, in familial and national ties, in pain, healing, loss and rediscovery to read it." --Swedish Book Review "A Storm Blew in from Paradise touchingly portrays the drama, absurdity, and insignificance of life as a political refugee." --MO Magazine