ADE

A gem of a first novel and a heartbreaking love story about a 20 year old woman and a young Islamic, Swahili man Adé who meet, fall in love, and become engaged on the island of Lamu off the coast of Kenya -- one of the original Swahili settlements in Kenya’s oldest continually inhabited town. By Alice Walker's daughter.

Adé gives her the Muslim name of Farida which means “exceptional, a jewel. There is no other like her. She stands alone.” Farida is traveling with a girlfriend, but when she meets Adé, she decides to stay on the island and her girlfriend continues without her. Farida and Adé become lovers and live in one of the traditional small white houses on the island, which she calls their “House of Words” – it's there they teach each other their languages and she agrees to marry him. Adé's mother and sisters begin instructing her in the traditional ways of being an Islamic wife. But the imam won’t allow the ceremony to proceed unless Adé travels to America to ask permission of her parents, which means he must go to Nairobi for the first time to arrange for a passport made possible by Farida's bribes. Farida is traumatized by the corruption, violence, prejudice and murder she encounters along the way and eventually succumbs to malaria on what happens to be the first day of the Gulf War. Rebecca has written an exceptionally affecting novel, one of the most heartbreaking love stories since THE LOVER by Marguerite Duras.

Rebecca Walker was chosen as one of Time magazine's fifty future leaders of America and one of the most influential leaders of her generation.She has made a substantial contribution to the global conversation about identity, power, culture, and the evolution of the human family through books, lectures, blogs, social networks, popular magazines, literary and academic journals, radio programs, film and television appearances and content development.
She graduated cum laude from Yale in 1992 and co-founded the Third Wave Foundation. Walker is considered one of the founding leaders of the Third Wave of feminism. Her writing has appeared in Glamour, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Vibe, among many other magazines and literary collections. She blogs regularly for the Huffington Post, and she has appeared on Charlie Rose, Good Morning America, Oprah, and other media.
Rebecca has addressed audiences at over five hundred universities and corporate campuses including Harvard, Brown, MIT, Oberlin, and The University of Utrecht.
Rebecca teaches the art of memoir in MFA programs and at writing conferences internationally, and is a private publishing consultant to writers of both fiction and non-fiction developing their work for publication.
Rebecca is the daughter of Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Alice Walker and esteemed civil rights attorney Mel Leventhal.