THE WINDOW SEAT

The award-winning Sierra Leonean novelist looks at her life through multiple lenses.

“I love to fly….I love the drama of the takeoff. The improbability of the whole endeavor.” With this endearing admission, Forna inaugurates her first nonfiction work since The Devil That Danced on the Water (2002), which chronicled her search for the truth about her father’s execution in Sierra Leone in 1974. This collection ranges across topics as varied as colonialism, childhood memories, and chimpanzees. Her gaze takes in big events like Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the Trump inauguration, but she’s at her best when coaxing hard-won wisdom out of everyday details. “Sleep is a political issue,” she declares in an essay about insomnia, noting how 18th-century Parisians would smash streetlamps to protest the conditions of sleep forced on them by the government. Forna glides smoothly among memoir, travel writing, history, and literary studies. The prose is intimate and conversational—“I do not have resting bitch face”—but the feeling of chatting over coffee belies the attention she gives to each sentence. Travel is ubiquitous in the text. Marveling at her mother’s experiences—she “has lived in nineteen countries on five continents….In between she has visited dozens more, taking in new countries year by year”—the author can barely go a page without mentioning a vacation to Thailand, a road trip through Death Valley, a winter in Tehran, and, of course, many trips to Sierra Leone. Everything is defined by roots, from Lebanese tourists to a Sri Lankan former banker to Croatian Nikola Tesla to the Kenyan ancestry of Barack Obama. Of the migrant population in her mother’s ancestral Shetland Islands, Forna writes: “The question ‘Where do you come from?’ is not followed by the spoken or silent ‘originally,’ but the word ‘now.’ ” Caught between worlds, Forna prefers to see them all from above, no doubt while on the plane to her next destination.

A grand sweep of peoples and cultures united by a longing for what home really means.