Cloth Girl

From AwardAnnals

Book:	Cloth Girl
Author:	Marilyn Heward Mills
Honors:	2006 Costa-1st Novel shortlist Score: 6.56
Genres:	Fiction books
Publisher:	Little Brown and Co.

Matilda Quartey is fourteen years old when sophisticated black Gold Coast lawyer Robert Bannerman sets eyes on her and resolves to take her as his second wife. For Julie, his first wife, this is a colossal slap in the face that she is not willing to tolerate. For Matilda it is an abrupt—and cruel—end to childhood.

On the other side of the colony, Audrey Turton, wife of the new ADC to the Governor, is appalled by her new life in Africa, where the reality has borne no relation to her dream of glamour and adventure. Angry, flirtatious and reckless, she drinks away the days, dreaming of home leave and waiting for something to happen.

This first novel, by turns funny and heartbreaking, is set on the Gold Coast in the 1940s, during the ten years leading up to independence. Her Africa is a cauldron of contradictions: fatalistic but brimming with optimism; outwardly Christian, yet profoundly superstitious and reliant on fetish priests; poverty-stricken but rich in pride and family values; vibrant with colour, darkened by violence; exhausting yet exhilarating.

For Matilda it is her passionately loved homeland. For Audrey it is a prison. For the men it is a land of opportunity where careers can be made and broken, fortunes lost and won. And for all of them the events of these ten years will shape and define their lives forever.

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