Into the Go-Slow

Bridgett M. Davis

Aug 2014 · The Feminist Press at CUNY

About this eBook

A young black woman visits Africa on a quest for peace, meaning, and love in “a beautiful allegory at the heart of a realist novel . . . A strong book” (Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas).
 
In 1986 Detroit, twenty-one-year-old Angie is still mourning the death of her brilliant, radical sister, Ella, when she impulsively decides to pack up and go to the place where Ella tragically died four years before: Nigeria. There, Angie retraces her sister’s steps, all the while navigating the chaotic landscape of a major African country on the brink of democracy and careening toward a coup d’état.
 
At the center of her quest is a love affair that upends everything Angie thought she knew about herself. Against a backdrop of Nigeria’s infamous “go-slow”—traffic as wild and unpredictable as the country itself—Angie begins to unravel the mysteries of the past, and opens herself up to love and life after Ella.

About the author

Bridgett Davis’s debut novel Shifting Through Neutral was published in 2004 by Amistad/ HarperCollins. The novel was a Borders Books “Original Voices” Selection and a finalist for the 2005 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright LEGACY Award. Davis was selected as the New Author of the Year by Go on Girl! Book Club—the largest national reading group for African American women.Davis’s essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, TheRoot.com and a host of other publications.She is a professor at Baruch College, City University of New York, where she is the director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program, and she is the curator for the popular monthly Brooklyn reading series, Sundays @.