Olive Witch

Name: Olive Witch
Brand: Harper Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Abeer Y. Hoque
ISBN: 9780062677655

Author: Abeer Y. Hoque

Narrator: Abeer Y. Hoque

Unabridged: 7 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Harper

Published: 02/07/2017

Categories: Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Memoirs, Judaism, Historical Biography

Synopsis

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.

About Abeer Y. Hoque

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, Wasafi ri, 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

Reviews

Goodreads review by Sezin on November 07, 2017

This book is exquisite. I've never read a memoir by a fellow Third Culture Kid and this experience changed my life. I cannot recommend this book enough, and not just for TCKs. Link to my full review to follow once I've placed it.......more

Goodreads review by Waverly on March 29, 2017

Fascinating format for a memoir with short, lyrical essays, each one preceded by a song or poem and a temperature. The author writes about her attempts to find a place where she belongs: her parents are both from Bangladesh but Abeer was born and raised in Nigeria until her parents moved to Pittsbur......more

Goodreads review by Abha on February 18, 2016

The writer's prose is poetic. This novel of poems and prose shows the inner thoughts of a sensitive soul, tormented with ideas of trying to fit in, in societies to which she does not belong, for her origins are elsewhere, and that origin is also lost to her since she has not lived there. So a Bangla......more

Goodreads review by Tayo Oviosu on June 05, 2016

Beautifully written with such candor I thoroughly enjoyed reading Olive Witch. I usually don't like reading non-fiction but decided to read this after enjoying "The Lovers and the Leavers" by the same author. In Olive Witch, Abeer takes us on an adventure through three countries. Navigating her life......more

Goodreads review by Esther on April 30, 2017

Fascinating journey from childhood in Nigeria, and time in Bangladesh, and Philadelphia. She is a gutsy lady, strong young girl to face such immense changes and emerge with this can't-put-down-this memoir! I will look for future books from this wonderful author.......more