The Boy They Could Not Kill

di O. Moses (Autore)

Moses, O., 2026

Born in a year of locusts on the shores of a great African lake, Owiny Amoth Onyango comes into the world with his fists closed tight around something the midwife cannot pry loose. His mother calls it a gift. His country will spend the next eighty years trying to take it from him. Son of the first vice-president of a newly independent republic, Owiny grows up watching his father pace the verandah of a house arrest, asking questions no one dares answer. At sixteen he is sent to East Germany to study engineering. He returns a decade later with a degree, a plan, and a factory. He finds a wife named Ida who will prove tougher than the regime. He builds a life. And then the soldiers come. What follows is nine years across three prison cells, a water cell in a government basement, a garden in a maximum-security block, and the long education of a man who refuses to confess. He runs for president five times. He is robbed twice by numbers that do not add up. He swears himself in before a million people when the government turns off the television. He makes peace with the man who stole his victory because the country is burning and somebody has to stop the fire. The people give him names: Agwambo, the unpredictable. Tinga, the tractor that will not stop. Baba, father of the nation. He does not stop. The lake remembers him. They begin to call him Baba, father. He runs for the presidency. He loses. He runs again. He loses again. He is robbed of two elections that he won. He swears himself in at a great park in front of a million people while the government switches off the national television. He shakes hands with the man who stole his country from him because the country is on fire and somebody has to put it out. And on a morning in his eighty-first year, in a quiet town by a different ocean, his great old heart finally puts down its work and stops. The country goes silent for a week. The lake, the elders say, rose a foot the night he died. The Boy They Could Not Kill is a novel about a man, but it is also a novel about a country and about every country like it: every place where independence came easier than freedom, where mothers stood at prison gates with smuggled letters in their stockings, where a single old man with a hoarse voice could fill a stadium just by walking onto the grass. It asks the question every great nation has to answer: What do you do with the man who would not die for you, when you cannot quite bring yourself to let him win?

• Autore: O. Moses
• Anno edizione: 2026
• Editore: Moses, O.
• Formato: EPUB2 con DRMFREE
• Lingua: Inglese
• Compatibilità: Tutti i dispositivi (eccetto Kindle)
• Layout: Reflowable
• EAN: 9798235621589