Our Beautiful Darkness

A blackout leads two teens to discover the intimacy and vulnerability that can only be shared in darkness in Our Beautiful Darkness, a fully illustrated YA novella from celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki and illustrator Antnio Jorge Gonalves. Translated from Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann A Kirkus Best YA Book of 2024 A Five Books Best New Book for Teens of 2024 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 countrys history with a teenage boys 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.