Unity Dow is Botswana’s first female high court judge and a long-time activist for women’s rights and the rights of the poor. Explaining her choice to focus her first novel on the AIDS crisis, Dow says, “I really could not have written a contemporary novel on Botswana without devoting a major part of it to AIDS. I can’t imagine a five-minute conservation about anything not somehow veering towards AIDS. If I invite guests to dinner, I can expect at least one to cancel at short notice because of a funeral or illness to attend to.” Dow has written a second novel, The Screaming of the Innocent, and a childhood memoir, Juggling Truths. |
Far and Beyon' Far and Beyon’ tells the story of a Botswanan family’s struggle to cope with the devastatation of HIV and poverty. Reeling from the loss of a second son to AIDS, Mara turns to traditional magic to fight the curse she believes is destroying her family. Her children, Mosa and Stan, increasingly reject such beliefs, choosing instead to fight the powerlessness and oppression that have made the family so vulnerable to HIV. In the process, they must challenge adult authorities and scrutinize the ways in which they unwittingly consent to the forces that constrict them. “Dow neither romanticizes nor demonizes the ancestral tradition. As only an insider can, she shows the ignorance, the abuse, and the corruption of power as well as the richness of extended family and community, and the dynamic roots that give Mosa her strength.” —Booklist “The power, the hope and the anguish of the people of Africa speak from every page.” —Dr. Miriam J. Hirschfield, World Health Organization “The Botswana of village life, of ceremony, of family, noise, rites of passage, love, tragedy, food, violence and kinship are gritty on the page. Dow writes this world the way men and women in her country sing—with a zest fed by connection to the earth and to a shared past. . .She has Botswana’s dirt under her nails and is not anxious to scour it out.” —The Age
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