Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Funny and heartfelt, this amalgamation of memoir and essay collection tells the story of twenty months the author spent in Lesotho, the small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, surrounded by people who take strangers' hands as they walk down the road, people who--with sweetest face--drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded pride incites murder and families are devastated by the AIDS epidemic.
Driven by a spirit of openhearted cultural exchange in the style of Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country and Alexandra Fuller's Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Will McGrath's Everything Lost Is Found Again is a love-drunk ballad to Lesotho, infusing humor and heart into pop ethnography.
Synopsis
*Author's work has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, the Christian Science Monitor, and Guernica
*Regular contributor to Pacific Standard
*Excerpts of this work won the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction (2014), Black Warrior Review's Nonfiction Prize and The Southeast Review's Narrative Nonfiction Prize (2015
*In addition to this manuscript, McGrath has two forthcoming books: one a collaboration with a South African photographer, the other a scholarly book co-authored with his wife.
*Two-time finalist for the Disquiet International Literature Prize
*Author lived in Lesotho for twenty months before and during the writing of this book
*A work of pop anthropology, written in short punchy chapters that explore Lesotho's beautiful culture (food, music, language, and customs)