"Acclaimed memoirist Forna (The Devil That Danced on the Water) glides into fiction with this sweeping portrayal of the lives of five Sierra Leonean women. Abie — a young woman born and raised in Sierra Leone, who now lives in London with her Portuguese-Scottish husband and their children — receives a letter from her aunts informing her they're bequeathing her the family coffee plantation. When Abie returns, her aunts offer her another gift: their stories. A native of Sierra Leone, Forna unpacks Abie's family history (and that of Sierra Leone) using the alternating points of view of Abie's four aunts — Asana, Mary, Hawa and Serah. Asana outlives two husbands and eventually opens her own store, 'relinquishing the birthright of womanhood in exchange for the liberty of a man.' Mary addresses the changes brought to Africa by the Europeans (prominent among them, the mirror she uses to examine her disfigured face). Hawa trades her gold earrings for bus fare in order to see the sea just once in her life. And Serah opens a voting station during corrupt national elections. Though it's a stretch to call this a novel (each chapter is a self-contained story), Forna's work sheds light on the history of a long-struggling nation. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"The jacket copy on 'Ancestor Stones' suggests that this excellent novel resembles 'The Joy Luck Club.' It doesn't, not really. Aminatta Forna seems here more like Isabel Allende at the height of her early, inspired, politically testifying powers. Forna sees clearly that in human life, the personal and the public are inextricably combined. What goes on in a country reflects what goes on inside its... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) houses, and what goes on in its houses is a refraction of what occurs outside.

The outside, in this novel, is Sierra Leone (although it is never explicitly named), an unassuming thumbprint of a West African coastal country, surrounded on three sides by Guinea and Liberia. Sierra Leone: the worst childbirth mortality rate in the world, an exploitive diamond industry whose profits end up in the hands of the unscrupulous rich, and a recent civil war that burned for more than a decade and resulted in thousands of casualties and many more thousands of amputees. 'Ancestor Stones' is a marvelous novel, but it's also history — at once lush, despairing, hopeful, horrifying.

The fictional structure does indeed echo 'The Joy Luck Club.' Abie, an African woman living in London with her white husband and two children, receives a letter from her mother country, 'from which no letter had arrived for a decade or more.' The letter is from a distant cousin and it says, in part, 'The coffee plantation at Rofathane is yours. It is there.' But in Abie's native language, 'It is there' translates to: It is 'less than well, requiring the help of God or man.' She understands this to be a desperate call for help from her home village, and so she returns to see what she can do.

Once there, she falls in with the company of four of her aunts. Her grandfather had 11 wives, and there are many, many more aunts in the old family compound, but these are the ones who are finishing their lives without husbands, the ones who have free time to speak and pass on their complicated family stories. These women are far more than allegorical figures or the mere means to further a plot. They're each nuanced, unique, entirely believable. There's the imperious Asana, daughter of Abie's grandfather's head wife; the sweet-souled but physically deformed Mariama, whose life reveals the spiritual history of her country; Serah, who early on got involved with the politics of the national so-called democracy; and Hawa, malcontent, grudge-holder and hell-raiser who'd climb a tree to commit a petty crime when she could stay on the ground and remain an honest woman. Over the course of half a year, these women tell their stories to Abie and reveal a gorgeous, perilous, hitherto unknown land for our perusal.

Asana, in her eighties now, can remember when her father first came to this place and started the village and the coffee plantation to go with it. She's had an event-filled, even modern life, and only toward the end of the novel does she recall, sadly, 'We had a herbalist, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a birth attendant and a boy who never grew old. Soothsayers prepared us for the unexpected. Teachers travelled to us. ... There existed an order, an order in which everybody had their place. An imperfect order. An order we understood.' A version of Eden, then, but how long can any Eden ever last?

The village, which has rich traditions dating back thousands of years, is crazily assaulted, first by a Muslim fanatic who exhorts all its inhabitants to burn every image and sculpture of their own native gods. The Muslim is soon followed by squadrons of Christian missionaries determined to redeem pagan babies. Both sides of this struggle think they're saving souls. The spiritual Mariama first takes the position that her people have deserted their own gods, but then — again, toward the end of the novel — she has a disturbing vision: What if it's the other way around? In her dream of the old gods, 'They had their backs to us, they were walking away, headed to some other dimension. ... They were arm in arm, laughing out loud. Without a care in the universe.' They leave the forlorn country to wreck itself in a senseless, savage civil war, where your hand is apt to get lopped off if you vote the wrong way.

The smart, secular Serah is the one to tell the political stories, ranging from the first election when, as a dopey girl put in charge of a polling station, she absent-mindedly marked every vote for her boyfriend's candidate, because no voters ever showed up. Then, years later, she risks her life to open a polling station where people do come, and soldiers start to shoot. She behaves heroically, but the end result is about the same.

This novel is no high-hearted political polemic. All human beings have a nasty streak, and the crabby Hawa can't be in a scene without committing a crime. She perceives everyone as against her, from all the wives and their children to the white men who come to exploit the country's natural resources and bring down the precarious social order. She takes her revenge in various inappropriate, wildly imaginative ways. Her son has gone into the army (we don't know which army), and we're left to assume that he inherited her burning, all-encompassing resentment. But Hawa is fearsomely brave in her snippiness, her wickedness. She survives a refugee camp and awful atrocities — and returns home. Home to that sweet, fragile, dangerous village from which almost everything has been taken.

Aminatta Forna, who is a broadcaster for the BBC, did indeed return to her home village after the war. In a recent interview on the Internet, she suggests that — by Western interpretations — everyone in her country may be suffering a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. How could they not be? And yet she has given us a full family portrait of a set of glorious, funny, tenacious, incredibly resilient souls. It's a miracle in some ways. It seems humans can survive almost anything. That should give us all hope." Reviewed by Carolyn See, who may be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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A dark rock the shape of a man's cigar. A broken pebble, open like a split plum. A stone with a dimple that fitted my thumb. A twinkling crystal. A pale three-cornered stone. I won't say I found them quickly. Not at all. Bobbio helped me. But even then, there were some I never found, whose faces I did not remember as well as I imagined. The Ancestors, my mother called them. Her murmured chant, once engraved upon my brain, now suddenly was gone. The effort of remembering turned into a great rock. Then, when I finally abandoned the effort, the words appeared, like a sculpture carved out of sandstone. And now I recognize them for what they are. Names. The name of my mother's mother. Of my grandmother. Of my great-grandmother and her mother. The women who went before. The women who made me. Each stone chosen and given in memory of a woman to her daughter. So that their spirits would be recalled each time the stone was held, warmed by a human hand, and cast on the ground to ask for help. And as the names emerged from the shadows, I saw how in taking them from her my father had destroyed my mother.