Our Beautiful Darkness

A blackout leads two teens to discover the intimacy and vulnerability that can only be shared in darkness, in this fully illustrated YA novella from celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki

The light goes out suddenly. And in this absence of light, a pair of teenagers bare their souls. Into the warm silence of the night, they share a conversation filled with their stories and dreams . . . and maybe even a first kiss.

Set against the backdrop of the civil war that ravaged Angola in the 1990s, this book weaves the country’s history with a teenage boy’s family stories. But when a power outage shrouds the neighborhood in darkness, everyday realities fade away . . . As the boy and a girl sit talking in the backyard, memory gives way to imagination and vulnerability, and the space between them becomes charged with emotional electricity.

Their resulting conversation is both a meditation on the storytelling impulse and a gripping narrative of first love that, through its particulars, ascends to the universal.

Ondjaki was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1977. His novels, short stories, poetry, and children’s books have received numerous prizes. He received the José Saramago Prize and Littérature-Monde Prize for his novel Transparent City, which was translated into seven languages and included in best-book roundups by Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lit Hub, Globe and Mail, World Literature Today, and more. António Jorge Gonçalves is a Portuguese creator of graphic novels and picture books. A long-time political cartoonist for the Portuguese newspaper Público, he has also published in Courrier Internacional and Le Monde. He created a live digital drawing technique with which he has performed onstage with musicians, actors, and dancers worldwide. He received Portugal’s National Illustration Prize for this book. Lyn Miller-Lachmann translates children’s books from Portuguese to English, including award-winning picture book The World in a Second and YA graphic novel Pardalita. She is the author of Torch, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for YA Literature, and co-author (with Zetta Elliott) of the middle grade verse novel Moonwalking.