Ambiguous Adventure

Hailed by Chinua Achebe as one of the greatest African novels ever written, this long-unavailable classic tells the tale of young Samba Diallo, a devout pupil in a Koranic religious school in Senegal whose parents send him to Paris to study philosophy. Unknown to Samba, it is his family's desperate attempt to better understand the French colonial forces transforming their traditional way of life.

But for Samba, it's an exciting adventure, and once in France he excels at his new studies and is delighted by both the French language and his new 'marvelous comprehension and total communion' with the Western world. But Samba's joy soon turns to doubt, as he finds himself torn between the materialistic secularism and isolation of French civilization and the deeper spiritual influences of his homeland. As Samba puts it: 'I have become the two.'

Written in an elegant, lyrical prose, Ambiguous Adventure is a masterful expression of the immigrant experience and the repercussions of colonialism, and a great work of literature about the uneasy relationship between Islamic Africa and the West-a relationship more important today than ever before.