Une BD nigériane d’Àlàbá Ònájìn inspirée des Aventures de Tintin

L’artiste et auteur nigérian Àlàbá Ònájìn prépare une nouvelle série de BD, « The Adventures of Ajani », qui s’adresse autant aux adultes qu’aux enfants. Dans un style influencé par la « ligne claire » d’Hergé, Àlàbá Ònájìn présente le point de vue nigérian sur la fin de la domination britannique dans les années 1960 à travers son héros Ajani, journaliste yoruba malin et curieux et fervent partisan de l’indépendance.

Dans le premier tome de la série intitulé THE KELP CONSPIRACY, alors que le Nigéria tente de gagner son indépendance, les puissances étrangères pèsent encore fortement sur la gouvernance du pays et la corruption s’installe. La société britannique Kelp Oil and Gas cherche à faire échouer le projet d’indépendance et garder ainsi la mainmise sur l’exploitation pétrolière de la région. A travers des personnages emblématiques, l’histoire véhicule les valeurs de l’amitié, la loyauté et la victoire du bien sur le mal.

Biographie de l’auteur : Àlàbá Ònájìn is a Freelance Cartoonist and Illustrator. He was born in Lagos state, Nigeria and has a Diploma in Freelance Cartooning and Illustration from The Morris College of Journalism, Surrey, Kent, UK. He is currently living in Lagos, Nigeria. He has always had a passion for telling stories through his drawings ever since he was introduced to Hergé’s Tintin books at a very young age; these books sparked an energy to bring his stories to young readers around the world. Ònájìn’s work includes Anike Eleko, a children’s comic book on girls’ education by Farafina Books, On Ajayi Crowther Street, a graphic novel published by Cassava Republic in collaboration with the German cultural organization Goethe Institut, and other art collaborations with UNESCO on the Role of Women in African History Project, illustrating the lives of three great African women: Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, Empress Taytu Betul of Ethiopia, and Miriam Makeba.

“I found in the words and pictures of this Nigerian artist, the page-turning sense of adventure I so admired in Tintin, without the impetuous colonialist language and bigoted depictions that had made me shelf Hergé’s iconic work. . . Rather than present simple and dichotomized plots, we learn of Nigeria’s past and are drawn to understand the historical implications of colonization, as well as politics, environmental issues, and ultimately, evergreen and universal human relations. Giving us a lens into a vibrant Western Africa, while making the subjects presented deeply personal and relatable.” – Juana Medina, author/illustrator of the award-winning Juana and Lucas series

THE WANTED GIRL de Rajasree Variyar

This page-turning reading group novel follows Asha, a young South Indian woman growing up in Australia, frustrated with her mother’s secretiveness about her past. When the family return to South India, Asha is determined to discover what her mother is hiding – but when her investigation leads her to dark secrets, can she come to terms with the truth?

THE WANTED GIRL
by Rajasree Variyar
Orion UK, Spring 2023

Sydney, 2019. Twenty-five-year-old Asha, who has grown up in Australia, knows very little of her mother’s past in India. As far as her Amma is concerned, the past doesn’t matter, it’s their future that counts. But when Asha’s paternal grandfather is taken ill, her beloved father requests that they return to Madurai to see him, and he wants the whole family to go. Asha is fascinated by what her mother is hiding, and determined to discover the truth about her background: knowing all the while that she is also hiding something from her family.
Madurai, 1992. Janani is a young mother trapped in an unhappy marriage, under pressure from her husband and mother-in-law to give birth to a son. Daughters are expensive to raise and rarely survive birth, with families often taking matters into their own hands to ensure this. But Janani has a dream – a dream of escaping her misery, of finding love, and experiencing happiness. And, above all, of protecting her children no matter what.
As Asha delves deeper into the truth, she starts to suspect what her mother has been running from for all these years. But can she forgive her for everything she has hidden?
Similar to A Thousand Splendid Suns in its sweeping depiction of the plight of women, Where the Crawdads Sing, and The Beekeeper of Aleppo.

Born in Bangalore and raised in Sydney, Australia, Rajasree Variyar has been a Londoner for the last five years, where she juggles writing alongside a career in insurance. She received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in 2020. Her manuscript of THE WANTED GIRL was shortlisted for the 2019 Mo Siewcharran/Hachette UK prize. Her short stories have won second prize in the Shooter Literary Magazine short story competition in 2019 and been long-listed for the Brick Lane Bookshop short story competition in 2020.

HOW TRUST WORKS de Peter H. Kim

A timely and important examination of one of the most essential factors in all successful relationships: trust, by a leading expert in the field of trust, betrayal and redemption, in a debut book that is the result of more than twenty years of research into the science of trust repair.

HOW TRUST WORKS (And The Science of How to Repair It)
by Dr. Peter H. Kim
Flatiron, Publication Date TBD

In HOW TRUST WORKS, Dr. Kim will explain the two most powerful determinants of trust (perceived competence and perceived integrity) and why those determinants can be weighted so unevenly when we are deciding whether to trust or forgive someone—or not. We as humans are bad at determining the trustworthiness of other people, and we are even worse at defending our own trustworthiness when it comes under fire. Yet despite this shortcoming, and the fact that we are all keenly aware of how important trust is in all of our personal and professional relationships, surprisingly little substantive research had been done on the topic before Dr. Kim began his inquiries. In fact, the majority of our institutional knowledge at the time seemed to rely almost entirely on case studies and other anecdotes. Dr. Kim was forced to develop his own set of rigorous scientific tools that would help him analyze how people interact with one another in the face of conflict.
Dr. Kim will illustrate how the patterns he identified in the lab play out in the real world using both recent and infamously public examples of trust violations and attempts at repair. These examples range from why the public was willing to overlook Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sex scandal but never forgave Bill Clinton, to revisiting the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville and reactions to the police killing of George Floyd, including an examination of how different cultures can develop very different views about what constitutes an irredeemable transgression.

A Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, Dr. Peter H. Kim is a leading expert in the field of trust, betrayal and redemption. His work has been published in leading scientific journals, including the Journal of Experimental Psychology, as well as in popular news outlets such as The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, and others. Dr. Kim was born in Korea, and his family came to the United States when he was a child. He has given talks in Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Canada, and he hopes to expand his international speaking circuit as soon as it is safe to do so.

DIE INSEL DER WÜNSCHE: STÜRME DES LEBENS de Anna Jessen

This island is her destiny. A moving tale of a woman’s fate in a picturesque setting.

DIE INSEL DER WÜNSCHE: STÜRME DES LEBENS
(The Island of Dreams: The Storms of Life)
by Anna Jessen
Goldmann/PRH Germany, March 2021

Hamburg, 1887. The young flower girl Tine Tiedkens is destitute. To escape her misery, she decides to try her luck on the island of Heligoland. But the crossing to the fashionable island turns into a nightmare, and when she arrives everything seems set against her. But then she unexpectedly runs into the young hotelier Henry Heesters, who once bought flowers from her in Hamburg, and lands a position in his elegant hotel. With diligence and enthusiasm, Tine works her way up from waitress to housekeeper – and falls in love with Henry. He, too, loves her – but just as happiness seems to be within reach, fate intervenes once again…

Anna Jessen has loved the North Sea since she was a child. To her, rocky Heligoland is the ‘Island of Dreams’, fascinating for its unique nature, loveable people and not least its unique history. Aside from travelling, Anna Jessen’s great passions are writing, music and working in the book trade.

DER ALGORITHMUS DER MENSCHLICHKEIT de Vera Buck

Why do people not want to be happy? And how can it be that only a machine can find the true path to happiness? For all readers of Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me.

DER ALGORITHMUS DER MENSCHLICHKEIT
(The Algorithm of Humanity)
by Vera Buck
Limes/PRH Germany, March 2021

If you meet Mari, you will notice that she is beautiful and almost hauntingly perfect. But also that she fails to get jokes and vies everything rationally. And if you get to know her better, you will notice that Mari needs neither sleep nor food. Because Mari is only almost human. Her artificial intelligence is constantly learning to do one job: to make people happy. When Mari ends up in a Berlin apartment after an unfortunate chain of circumstances with a motley crew of people, including the rebellious blogger Frieda and the lonely student Linus, she realizes that her mission is all but easy. The world follows its own logic, people’s desires are irrational and Mari has to understand that there exists a world beyond provable facts. How is she supposed to make beings happy that have no clue what they want? She comes up with a solution no human would have ever expected… DER ALGORITHMUS DER MENSCHLICHKEIT deals with questions that are becoming incredibly important in the current developments in the technology sector: What makes us human? Why do we need each other? And why do we actually need more of each other, and less of the new technologies that are constantly being developed?

Vera Buck, born in 1986, studied journalism in Hannover and scriptwriting on Hawaii. During this time she wrote texts for radio, television and print media and later short stories for anthologies and literary magazines. After working at universities in France, Spain and Italy, Vera Buck now lives and works in Zürich.