The Window Seat

Written by Aminatta Forna

Narrated by Aminatta Forna

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781705031018

Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna is a former BBC reporter and has presented on various political and current affair programmes. She is a contributor to several newspapers including the Independent and The Sunday Times. 'The Devil that Danced on Water' was a runner-up for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2003 and she has acted as judge for various awards including the MacMillan African Writer's Prize and the Samuel Johnson Prize. Her most recent novel is 'Ancestor Stones'.

Reviews for The Window Seat

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Non-fiction series of essays the author has written for various publications over the years, plus several new pieces, now consolidated into one place. The common theme is travel or migration, either by choice or necessity. Forna has been a world traveler from a young age. She has lived in a number of places around the globe, including Sierra Leone, Iran, Scotland, England, and the US. Her stories take the reader on a virtual trip to these locales, and others she has visited, portraying vignettes of her experiences in each location.

I have read three of Forna’s novels, and very much enjoy her expressive writing style, so I knew I was in for a treat. She switches seamlessly from serious subjects to humorous anecdotes. She conveys insightful comments about our society. There are a number of essays related to animals – dogs and chimpanzees in Sierra Leone, foxes in London, puffins in Scotland, deer and coyotes in the US. These essays encompass topics such as memories, movement, identity, race, gender, and voice. Highly recommended!

I received an advanced reader’s copy from the publisher via NetGalley. This book is due for publication in May, 2021.

[brenzi_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book of essays by a prose master. I really enjoyed her travel experiences and had no idea she lived in Iran as well as Sierra Leone, London and the U.S. I particularly liked the ones relating her experiences caring for abandoned dogs in Africa, foxes in London, and the Trump inauguration which she described in this way in an email to a friend: "what if you had an inauguration and no one came?" comparing it to the mobs for Obama's inauguration.

[crazymamie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“…I’d said that although we lived at a time when public and media attention was focused on those who migrated, I was interested in what it was that compelled people to stay in the place they first called home or hame. Ideas of home produce a cultural schism, for home is at once the focus of great nostalgia for some, equally for others home is a place they can’t wait to get away from. Home is somewhere you escape from, grow out of, return to. Yet even those who revere the idea of home rarely seem able adequately to describe it. I am often asked this question, Where is home? And sense that my efforts at a reply are found wanting. The reason for this, I believe, is a conceptual mismatch between me and my interlocutor on the definition of the word home. For them, those people who want an answer from me, I have discovered two things to be consistently true: home is always located in the past. It is not enough for me to say, ‘Arlington.’ Also, it is a noun used strictly in the singular. The word ‘homes’ is antithetical to the idea of home.” p.124 from the essay “Hame”This is a collection of seventeen essays, and they are all very good; several of them are excellent. All of them made me think. The only other work I have read by this author is [Happiness], which I highly recommend. For those of you who have read that one, there is an essay in this collection that will show you insights into how the portions about the foxes living in cities began to germinate in Forna's head. Aminatta Forna and I are of an age, and so her life experiences speak to me even though we have lived very different lives. In this collection, she reflects on the year 1979 when she was living in Tehran and had a front row seat to the Shah of Iran leaving and the Ayatollah Khomeini returning and the events that lead to the Iranian students storming the US Embassy and taking hostages. "I was fourteen, and about to see a part of somebody else's history being made. I wish I had been older, wiser. I wish I could remember more, had paid more attention, understood more - but then I remind myself that I was not alone. What happened in 1979 has happened many times before and many times since, in places where people have set themselves free and believed with all their hearts that the freedom they had fought for was real and lasting, only to be recaptured."She also writes about sexual harassment and insomnia and the meaning of home. She writes about childhood and about how some things that hurt us write on the slate of who we are and can never be erased. It is a lesson in perspective from a woman whom I share so much and yet so little with - her life experiences are so much bigger and so much broader than mine, and yet we are both women, both daughters and mothers, both in our fifties...I hope she writes more like this one and continues to share her journey with us.