WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE 2008 'From that moment on, there was to be a before and an after Africa for me.' In 1948, a young J. M. G. Le Clezio left behind a still-devastated Europe with his mother and brother to join his father, a military doctor in Nigeria, from whom he had been separated by the war. In his characteristically intimate, poetic voice, the Nobel Prize-winning author relates both the child's dazzled discovery of freedom in the African savannah and the torment of recalling his fractured relationship with a rigid, authoritarian father. The African is a memoir of a lost childhood and a tribute to a father whom Le Clezio never really knew. His legacy is the passionate anti-colonialism that the author has carried through his life. "Haunting' - The Guardian 'Le Clezio is ever the master at rendering existence at the level of sensation with a daring and admirable freshness of language' - New York Times 'A vivid depiction of a splintered childhood and the lovely wholeness procured from it' - Kirkus Reviews AUTHOR: J.M.G. Le Clezio (b.1940) is the author of more than forty works of fiction and non-fiction. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature as an author of new departures, poetic adventures and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation.