Bound

Description: The dry unforgiving winds of the Sahel swirl dust over the plains around the orphanage. Ali a young Chadian boy of seven spends his days shooting marbles and playing soccer with his fellow orphans waiting with hope to be taken away to a different world. When Laurent and Clara Girard drive through the orphanage gate one day Alis life is forever changed. The French couple adopts him and brings him to Chads bustling capital NDjamena where motorcycles roar across paved roads and the market is open late into the night. But Ali soon finds that his new experiences dont align with his expectations and he is placed between two competing worlds: his native culture and the foreign one that seeks to change him. As the pressure mounts and Ali is unable to make friends or master a new language he knows he must make a choice between his two worlds--or risk losing his identity forever. Endorsements: In this debut novella Aaron Brown evocatively portrays the landscape and people of Chad exploring at each turn the cultural and social borders between locals and expatriates. Bound is a story of loyalties: loyalties to country and family loyalties to self and others and those loyalties tested and betrayed. His searching insight and compassion for his characters elevates this story beyond the question of parental rights to the exploration of forgiveness. --Nicole Mazzarella Author of This Heavy Silence About the Contributor(s): Aaron Brown is a young novelist and poet who grew up in Chad Africa for ten years. His work has been featured in The Penwood Review North Central Review The Prairie Light Review and is forthcoming in Saint Katherine Review and Windhover. This is his first published novel.