In 1837, two young African princes arrive in Holland. At the invitation of Dutch emissaries to West Africa, the king of the Ashanti has sent his son and nephew to receive the blessings of a European education. But unbeknownst to the king, the boys are to become pawns in the brutal game of the illicit slave trade. As they enter a dreamlike, sometimes violent, altogether bewildering world, moving from a Dutch boarding school and its terrors to the Dutch royal court, their common experience will pull the once inseparable cousins onto divergent paths. For the one called Kwame, the new life will be his undoing. Enlisting in the Dutch colonial army, he will return to the land of his ancestors to face a truth that will destroy him. But Kwasi will awaken more slowly, spending a lifetime convinced he has found a place in a world not his own. Only in the year 1900, reconstructing his past through an intricate series of flashbacks as his light begins to fade on a barren coffee plantation in Indonesia, will he discover the extent of his self-deceptions. A feat of literary ventriloquism reminiscent of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day , Arthur Japin's internationally acclaimed first novel, based on an astonishing true story, is a fully original exploration of the meaning of friendship, belonging and honor. Japin's beautifully written debut novel is based on the true story of two West African princes, Kwasi and Kwame, who are sent by the king of Ashanti (modern-day Ghana) to study in Holland in the 1830s. In Holland, they attend a private boarding school, where Kwasi excels at his studies and Kwame at art. Neither boy fits in; they are ridiculed by some and shunned by others. Kwame never ceases to long for the day he can return home to Africa, whereas Kwasi embraces the new culture and tries to blend in as much as possible. The boys' different reactions to Dutch culture drive a wedge between them, and they choose separate paths. As Kwame tries to return home, Kwasi accepts a government post, only to encounter prejudice from every side. Both face harsh disappointments: Kwame from the home he thought would not forsake him, and Kwasi from the realization that the abandonment of his native culture has harmed him most of all. Quietly moving, Japin's novel is a powerful study of displacement and disillusionment. Kristine Huntley Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "A classic tragedy . . . insights abound throughout . . . This is a true story, fully and humanly imagined, and that is the measure of Japin's accomplishment." --Heidi Benson, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE "[A] novel of unusual power and authenticity . . . exceptionally well-told and emotionally absorbing--and it is only the beginning of a promising literary career for Japin." --Dennis Lythgoe, THE DESERET NEWS (Salt Lake City) " Fascinatingly ambitious . . . a historically complex, richly empathetic account of [Japin's] subject's life history . . . [He] writes with a performer's instinct for the concise, playable scene, . . . [with] an irony beyond the realm of ordinary fiction . . . [and] an arch, devastating delicacy . . . a haunting and highly unusual historical novel . . . Mr. Japin artfully allows the clever, cantankerous voice of his aged counterpart to take shape. This book ends beautifully with a shrewd, unsentimental sense of how the face of the aged Kwasi Boachi acquired its wisdom." --Janet Maslin, NEW YORK TIMES "Gorgeous . . . As in Conrad, the ultimate destination reveals not so much a place on the map as a view of the human heart . . . Japin has blended life and dream in an exquisite example of that trickiest of genres, the historical novel . . . a work that affirms the human heart's resilience even as it reveals its darkest prejudice." --Philip Connors, NEWSDAY "Quietly devastating . . . the historical disaster of European colonialism . . . is beautifully evoked by means of the twinned experiences of the two cousins. . . it takes a subject that by now may look stale--or should I say gray?--and gives it back its rich and tragic color." --Daniel Mendelsohn, NEW YORK "Rich and risky . . . the trick here depends on working the surfaces of things until they are exact -- whether it is a fever dream of Africa, the green fields of Java, the cold of a Dutch sickroom . . . [A] deeply humane book about a spectacularly exotic subject [with a] spaciousness and stamina, and an unforced sense of history, that nowadays are almost as unusual as Kwasi Boachi himself." --Michael Pye, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "A mesmerizing tale about the personal cost of assimilation . . . Like Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha , Japin's ventriloquism is virtually flawless." --John Freeman, TIME OUT NEW YORK "[A] brilliant first novel, a compact epic of the consequences of European colonization of Africa, written by a Dutch Renaissance man . . . a potent dramatization of culture shock, ethnic injustice, an