The #1 New York Times bestseller 'At once vivid and simple, lyrical and surgical, expressive and exacting' Lupita Nyong'o Dreams are today’s answers for tomorrow’s questions. Eleven-year-old Kofi Offin has dreams of water, of its urgent whisper that beckons with promises and secrets. He has heard the call on the banks of Upper Kwanta, West Africa, where he lives. He loves these things above all else: his family, the fireside tales of his father’s father, a girl named Ama, and, of course, swimming. But when the unthinkable – a sudden death – occurs during a festival between rival villages, Kofi ends up in a fight for his life. What happens next will send him on a harrowing journey across land and sea, and away from everything he loves. Yet Kofi’s dreams may be the key to his freedom...

Zac lives with his grandfather, Pops. When Pops is killed by muggers, Zac is devastated. Dumped with foster parents, then in an orphanage, Zac stumbles from trouble to trouble, but the one thing he hangs on to is Pops' obsession with their family history and his ambition to go to Ghana in search of a ransom paid by a descendant 200 years earlier, to keep his son from slavery - a ransom stolen by British government agents at the time, which then disappeared. At least, Zac thinks, he can keep faith with Pops by continuing his quest. So Zac wangles his own way to Ghana. Alone and far from home, he discovers that Pops' death and everything since is part of a wider plan by some shadowy others, also connected to the lost ransom. In a web of intrigue, deception, betrayal, skulduggery and murder that reaches out of the past to entrap everyone in the present, Zac's quest culminates in a perilous voyage to the Door of No Return in the walls of the ancient slave fort - through which the slaves were once herded to the boats that would take them across the ocean, on a journey many of them would never survive.

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history—the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

Publisher description

Looks at the history of Goree Island, which was used as a holding area by slavetraders for their captives

Grim and foreboding, they dominate the skyline, personifying the slave trade in all its ramifications - brutality, estrangement, alienation and social death. The slave forts of Ghana constitute an integral part of the Atlantic slave trade, and yet they have received scant scholarly attention. House of Slaves & `Door of No Return' addresses this gap in scholarly history, focusing on the dark past of these forts as well as their modern significance.

Senegal's cultural heritage sites are in many cases remnants of the French empire. This book examines how an independent nation decolonises its colonial heritage, and how slave barracks, colonial museums, and monuments to empire are re-interpreted to imagine a postcolonial future.