Mourning

“In Cairo she had lost a husband; in Freetown, she discovered she had stepped into a landscape where everyone was missing someone.” Mourning is a literary novel by Karen Williams set in the 1990s, moving between Cairo, Freetown, Sarajevo, Kailahun, rural Sierra Leone, and exile in Conakry. After Daniel, a journalist and war photographer, is killed in Cairo, his wife Marie travels to Freetown, where he once worked during Sierra Leone’s civil war. In a city of amputee camps, child soldiers, ruined buildings, and crowded beach bars full of peacekeepers and aid workers, she carries his camera and a small shrine from place to place, guided by Hassan, Daniel’s friend and fixer, who has his own history of escape and the loss of his brother. As Marie volunteers at an amputee camp, she realises she is being watched by a former child soldier whose gaze follows her across the city. When she chases him into a derelict building, she finds him hiding with Daniel’s black notebooks—field notes from massacres, an eight-year-old commander called “General Killquick,” and stories from Kailahun and Sarajevo. Through Daniel’s notebooks and figures like Hassan and J Com, a young man with war-damaged memory, Marie comes to see that her private grief is one strand in a larger web of violence, survival, and relationships—between husbands and wives, brothers, coworkers, and strangers bound by a single photograph or decision. Through shifting perspectives and locations, Mourning offers a close look at war reporting through local fixers and foreign correspondents, vivid depictions of postwar Freetown, and an examination of memory, complicity, and survivor’s guilt among journalists, survivors, and those left behind. Readers will find the story of a young widow leaving Cairo for war scarred Freetown after her husband’s killing; close, ground level views of war reporting in Sarajevo and Sierra Leone; depictions of amputee camps, child soldiers, and postwar city life in Freetown; interlinked narratives set in Cairo, Sarajevo, Kailahun, Freetown, and exile in Conakry; and a sustained exploration of grief, memory, complicity, and survivor’s guilt among those who witness violence and those who live with its aftermath.

By

,

Karen Williams

By

,

Karen Williams

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